Getting Mother’s Body (Magill’s Literary Annual 2004)
At a glance:
- Author: Suzan-Lori Parks
- First Published: 2003
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The 1960’s
- Setting: Texas and Arizona
- Principal Characters: Billy Beede, Willa Mae Beede, Clifford Snipes, Roosevelt Beede, Laz Jackson, Dill Smiles, Candy Napoleon
- Genres: Long fiction, Novel
- Subjects: Civil rights, 1960’s, Children, United States or Americans, Blacks, Twentieth century, Literature, Death or dying, Abortion, Funeral rites or ceremonies, Arizona, Texas, Tombs or graves, Coffins
- Locales: Arizona, Texas
An epic journey to dig up the remains of a mother, especially recounted using multiple points of view, cannot help but recall an earlier work about a journey to bury a mother’s body: William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, which thus becomes the intertext of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body. Faulkner’s experimental work, structured episodically as a series of interior monologues—including a memorable one spoken posthumously by Addie Bundren—chronicles the trials by flood and fire that Anse and his children face as they take the body of their...
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