Addie's chapter, in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, shows us the undiluted innerworkings of the consciousness of the mother and the core of the Bundren family. The chapter and the dry, angry, miserable, cynical tone of the woman gives the reader to knowledge of what has brought and held this unhappy family together as well as what will tear it apart once the children have finished carting Addie's rotting body to Jefferson.
Just as Addie had infected her children with a set of perceptions in which they have become imprisoned, Addie herself is prisoner to the perception left her by her father: "I could just remember how ny father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time" (169). Addie, of course, is in the last stages of dying as she mediates on her entire life in this chapter. She is haunted by the lifelessness of her father just as she haunts her children with her own bitter and hopeless dying and death. In the previous chapter, we have heard Cora's account of how she feared for her mother's salvation and how she tried to get Addie to pray with her to save her from sacrilege (seeing Jewel as her salvation) and damnation. Now Addie concludes her chapter with her own version of that same event:
One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too (176).
The chapter is the heart of the book because it shows in a concentrated form the shriveled soul of the woman at the center of the family. The chapter forces the reader, as does the rest of the book, to plumb his or her own soul and demands a human and spiritual response to a set of people who, aside from Darl, have no concept of selflessness or affirmation of life. Addie shows in this chapter that she believes she has found the answer to life, which is comprised of the accept...