Where are they going in as I lay dying?

Plot summary It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor, rural family’s quest and motivations—noble or selfish—to honor her wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi.

As the novel begins, Addie Bundren lays dying in her bedroom while her son Cash builds her coffin. Addie’s ineffectual husband, Anse, is arranging to have her buried in Jefferson, a town forty miles away, because Addie has requested this last wish.

Darl and Cash take the wagon along the river to the ford, with Jewel accompanying them on horseback. The trees break, and they spot Tull with Anse, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman on the other side of the river. … Anse’s mules float up out of the water, drowned.

Agamemnon says, “As I lay dying, the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.” As Faulkner’s novel opens, Addie Bundren is dying. She will not be allowed to rest in peace, however, as the family encounters a flood and a fire on the 40-mile trip to Jefferson to bury her.

Addie is Anse’s wife and mother to Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman (in that order). She narrates section 40, though she dies in Section 12.

Citing his current priorities as “a motion design career, deep focus on my family, taking care of my health, and working on other creative projects”, Hipa said that his decision to step away from As I Lay Dying, who reunited in 2018 after a few years of inactivity, came after “the story and meaning we built our reunion …

He suggests that Darl save himself and jump into the water. Cash is thrown into the water, holds onto the rope. Cash is kicked by Jewel’s horse, re-breaking his leg.

Dewey Dell goes to the pharmacy and asks the druggist Moseley to give her something to abort her pregnancy for ten bucks. Dewey Dell leaves Moseley’s without any medicine. She tells Vardaman to keep the burning barn events a secret. She calls for Jewel when he runs to the coffin by the fire.

Cash is the oldest son. He is the one whom Addie refers to when she says that she robbed Anse of one son. Cash was born at a time when his mother had just discovered that words are meaningless and that only through acts can people achieve an awareness of life.

When Samson first sees the Bundrens, we hear him assume that the Bundrens are taking a holiday, now that they have buried Mrs. Bundren. The irony here, of course, is that the average person would assume that a woman dead for four days would not be carted about the country in the back end of a wagon.

As I Lay Dying Section Thirty-Four, narrated by Darl.

Dewey Dell The sixteen-year-old, unmarried pregnant daughter who is trying to find a way to have an abortion.

First of all, Vardaman didn’t know he was drilling through her face; he was only trying to drill through the coffin. He thought his mother was still alive. If she’s still alive, then she needs air, and she can’t get air when the coffin is nailed close over her. So the answer is to put some holes in the box.

Faulkner, a Mississippi high school dropout, made it his mission to capture the emotional lives of the rural poor, unflinchingly writing about race, gender, sexuality, and power. … He wrote As I Lay Dying in six or eight weeks (six by Faulkner’s claim, eight by looking at the carbon typescript).

We see that Addie married Anse because there was nothing else to do. She was tired of the children, tired of teaching school, and she says that when Anse came along she simply accepted him without any thought. There is no implication of love but simply a marriage of convenience.

Cash Bundren Cash is Addie’s oldest child and narrates sections 18, 22, 38, 53, and 59.

In his novel As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner uses the Addie chapter as his statement of the artificiality of language and how words cannot be substituted for deeds. He shows how words often fail to communicate, how words are falsely used to imitate experience, and the significance of action over words.

As I Lay Dying singer Tim Lambesis has taken his official Instagram account to send his respects for his former band Nick Hipa. … Four years later, in 2018, the guitarist had rejoined them and break-up with the band once again in 2020. Throughout his career, Hipa released seven albums with the band.

The band named themselves after the 1930’s novel “As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner which is about the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s quest to bury her. According to the band there is no correlation between the book and the band, they just thought it sounded like a cool band name so they decided to steal it.

“Its exciting to be working on music again after some downtime,” says Lambesis. “‘Roots Below’ was originally a B-side leftover from when we recorded Shaped By Fire, but Phil [Sgrosso, guitar] and Josh really brought new life to it when they recently finished it and added new layers.”

In the early part of this section, Darl tells Vardaman that he heard his mother asking to be hidden from the sight of man. This is one of the motivating reasons behind Darl’s decision to burn the barn. … Therefore, he wants to thwart their selfish motives and at the same time give his mother a respectable cremation.

Consequently, it can be maintained that this is a rather ridiculous situation and that Darl laughs because he is intelligent and perceptive enough to recognize the absurdity of the entire situation.

After Addie’s death, Vardaman realizes that the fish, like his mother, is now in a different state of existence than before, leading him to conclude, “My mother is a fish.” This connection between Addie and fish emerges once again during the river episode, as Vardaman compares his mother’s coffin to the fish in the …

Peabody, the doctor, has been called by Anse and is making his way to the Bundrens’. At first he wondered if Tull had called him on behalf of the Bundrens, but he realizes that only Anse is unlucky enough to have summoned a doctor when a cyclone was building.

Addie Bundren, the wife of Anse Bundren and the matriarch of a poor southern family, is very ill, and is expected to die soon. Her oldest son, Cash, puts all of his carpentry skills into preparing her coffin, which he builds right in front of Addie’s bedroom window.

We are never to know definitely how Darl has come to discover that Dewey Dell is pregnant, but on account of his taunting her about her condition, Dewey Dell develops an intense hatred for her brother, and this hatred will later cause her to attack him violently.

But soon after Cash’s birth, Addie realized that words are not connected with violence and are useless. Thus she decides to close herself to Anse, who represents only the ineffectuality of words. Only through violence, and not through words, can Addie feel that she is living.

By the last few narrative sections in the novel, Cash has established himself as a reliable and sensible voice, a welcome refuge for the reader given the strange, disjointed words of Vardaman and the maniacal ranting of the now-insane Darl.

Jewel is Addie’s third child and narrates Section 4. His biological father is the Reverend Whitfield.

In its broadest terms, the structure of As I Lay Dying revolves around the preparations for and the actual journey from the Bundren farm to a town forty miles away in order to bury Addie Bundren.

Armstid. A local farmer who puts up the Bundrens on the second evening of their funeral journey. Anse repeatedly and rigidly refuses Armstid’s offer to lend Anse a team of mules.

He is convinced that the road that was put in near his house has brought bad luck, and he blames it for Addie’s ill health. Vardaman reappears, covered with blood after cleaning his fish. Anse tells Vardaman to go wash his hands.

The Bundrens are a poor family in the rural South, and there are a few details from the book that denote their poverty. In contrast, their neighbors the Tulls are a wealthier family, they have means and run successful businesses, and are less neurotic—leaving them more time to be successful.

MacGowan gives Dewey Dell a box of capsules and leads her to “the rest of the treatment” in the pharmacy basement, where he will take advantage of her. MacGowan’s attempt to pretend to be a doctor is not particularly sophisticated, and thus reveals the extent of both Dewey Dell’s desperation and her ignorance.

He sees the spot on the ground where he first laid the fish he caught, and thinks about how the fish is now chopped up into little pieces of “not-fish” and “not-blood.” Vardaman reasons that Peabody is responsible for Addie’s death and curses him for it.

Tull blames Anse for the misfortune of the situation, and explains how Jewel tightly gripped the rope keeping the coffin and the wagon within reach.

Looking both sheepish and proud, Anse introduces all of his children to the woman, and tells them all to “[m]eet Mrs. Bundren.”

He knew that Jewel was sneaking out at night because the lantern was always missing after dark. He and Cash figured he must have been sleeping with a married woman.

Jewel Bundren – Jewel is the third of the Bundren children, most likely around nineteen years of age. A half-brother to the other children and the favorite of Addie, he is the illegitimate son of Addie and Reverend Whitfield.

Darl Bundren – Darl is the second-eldest son of Anse and Addie Bundren. He has the most chapters of narration in the novel. He is frequently rude to his siblings and has a strange ability to describe events that he is not physically present for. He is around 28 years old.