Addie's in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

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).

Related Essays

Addie in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying Addie, in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, is .... left." The reader cannot possibly love Addie as portrayed by .... deferred are, says Hughes, like "raisin[s] in the .... (2043 8 )

Families in Two Works .... he was the only one of them that had his mother's nature, had any natural affection" (Faulkner 1532 .... Tull speaks of Anse(s reference to the dead Addie as if .... (1079 4 )

Dysfunctional Families in Literature .... he was the only one of them that had his mother's nature, had any natural affection" (Faulkner 1532 .... Tull speaks of Anse(s reference to the dead Addie as if .... (1079 4 )

the suffering she has instilled in her children, and yet increases her determination not to show her love for them or for life. The style of thought given Addie by Faulkner reflects perfectly her bitter philosophy: "In the afternoon when school was out," she begins, "and the last one had left with his little dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them" (169). She is as straightforward and honest about her hatred of life, others and herself as she can be, but her honesty is not the same as truth. She has shut herself off from the light of life, from the positive aspects of human existence, from love. She speaks of her husband in a style as dry as a stick and as determined to state her case for the misery of life as she is to beat a sense of awareness of her into her students: He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. . . . So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn't matter (172). This is the dry, bitter style of a woman who truly belie

Category: Literature - A