As I Lay Dying
As I Lay Dying,stream-of-consciousness novel by Faulkner, published in 1930.
Addie Bundren lies dying, and her children prepare to fulfill her desire to be buried in her native Jefferson (Miss.), far from the crude backcountry surroundings of her married life. Cash, one of her sons, makes her coffin, and when she is dead the family unites to carry out the one wish of hers it has ever respected. Another son, Vardaman, still a child, in shock confuses the excitement of catching a big fish and of his mother's death so that he says “my mother is a fish,” just as, remembering how he was stifled in a shut corn crib, he bores holes through the coffin so that she can breathe. Led by their mean, simple-minded, whining father, Anse, the family sets off in a mule-drawn wagon. Floods have washed out a bridge, and while fording a river they lose their team. Jewel, Addie's illegitimate son, also nearly loses his beloved horse as it too is plunged in the...
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