As I Lay Dying: Fifteen Voices, One Coffin

A poor family loads their dead mother into a homemade coffin and hauls it across flooded rivers and burning barns to bury her forty miles away, in the town where she asked to lie. That is the whole plot of As I Lay Dying. What makes it one of the great novels of the twentieth century is how Faulkner tells it.

He hands the story to fifteen different narrators, each speaking from inside their own head, and never once steps in to referee. We move from the dying woman herself to her grieving children to the neighbours who watch the grotesque procession pass. Each voice knows only its fragment; the truth of the family assembles itself in the gaps between them, and some of it is never spoken at all.

The result is funny, horrifying, and strangely tender — a poor Mississippi family’s private apocalypse rendered with the formal daring of high modernism. Darl’s mind unravelling, Vardaman’s grief that can only say ‘my mother is a fish,’ Addie’s single, devastating chapter spoken from beyond death: these are among the most extraordinary passages in American writing.

Faulkner claimed he wrote it in six weeks, on the night shift at a power plant, and changed not a word. This edition restores the complete 1930 text with a critical study of its fifteen voices.

Read As I Lay Dying — the Erato Press edition →