But, to take what is perhaps the very simplest, we can acknowledge that the death of Addie, a person who was at best respected and at worst feared, loved and hated at the same time, causes these sorts of questions to come up. This is a deceptively complex work, and there could be, and indeed has been, much discussion on Faulkner’s intended message.

Some innate sense of honor? A respect for the dead? To indulge their selfish motives? The family does not speak strongly enough collectively to say. Love alone clearly is not the motivation. And, even at the book’s finish, neither does the reader. But, partly thanks to the selfish motives of a few, such as those of father Anse, who wishes to purchase a set of false teeth in Jefferson, and daughter Dewey Dell, who is pregnant and wishes to find a doctor to perform an abortion, the Bundrens agree to carry out Addie’s wishes, even though none of them seems to understand why. They are in the midst of a rainstorm, and it will be a difficult journey by wagon across muddy roads and uninhabited country. Immediately following her death there is some discussion as to whether they will follow her wishes at all. As her last wish, Addie asks that she is buried near Jefferson, the county seat, about 30 miles north of the Bundrens’ farm, so that she can be with her family, that is, her birth family. She has few loving words for her children or husband, and they have little for her (or any of each other, for that matter). The dying woman Addie is a proud and bitter person.

Set in the same fictional county in which Faulkner would place many of his novels, Yoknapatawpha County in Northwest Mississippi in the 1930s, it quickly becomes clear that this is not an altogether happy family. A single death provides the author a vehicle for encapsulating a microcosm of life. But by cycling through the perspective of 15 distinct narrators, and employing a stream of consciousness prose that ranges from colloquial to near-incomprehensible, Faulkner takes an at once profound and pedestrian premise and, filtered as it is through the consciousnesses of these very different characters, shows us a veritable kaleidoscope of deep-seated responses to a defining moment a host of lessons can be learned, just as easily as none at all. His third novel, As I Lay Dying, concerns a relatively simple set of events: the death of the Bundren family matriarch, and their difficult subsequent journey through the countryside to bury her body. Faulkner was a “Southern” writer, in the vein of Flannery O’Connor, but like O’Connor, his works tend to speak to larger themes.

Author of as i lay dying