As I Lay Dying

"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home." says Darl Bundren in William Faulkner's poetic novel As I Lay Dying. The title of this novel comes from Homer's Odyssey. As I lay dying are words spoken by Agamemnon's shade in Hades as he recounts his homecoming murder by his wife."As I lay dying the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyelids for me as I descended into Hades." While touching on the Greek classics I will mention that this novel reminds of Sophocles' tragedy Antigone, the story of a sisters repeated attempts to bury her brother. Leaving ancient Greece we find ourselves in late 1920s Mississippi as the Bundren family prepare to take their wife and mother Addie, who is about to die, to her home town of Jefferson for burial. When she dies, early in the novel, they take the coffin by wagon and must endure flooded rivers and fire among other obstacles to get her there nine days later. The burden that the Bundrens carry in the wagon is mostly themselves, each self an onerous cargo. The story is told through multiple first person viewpoints of the family members, neighbors, and the people they meet along the way. Working the graveyard shift in a power plant Faulkner wrote this lyrical masterwork in about eight weeks. I like where Cash alludes to the golden rule in his carpenter language "Folks seem to get away from the olden right teaching that says to drive the nails down and trim the edges well always like it was for your own use and comfort you were making it". Hunting horn in hand Faulkner sounds the note mort in this novel. The Bundrens form a kind of rolling wake around Addie's coffin as the wagon wheels whisper a dirge in the Mississippi mud and the sky above them wears black circles in mourning.
I made it on the bevel.
1. There is more surface for the nails to grip.
2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam.
3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant.
Water moves easiest up and down or straight across.
4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the time.
So the seams and joints are made up-and-down.
5. In a bed where people lie down all the time,
the joints and seams are made sideways, because
the stress is sideways.
6. Except.
7. A body is not square like a crosstie.
8. Animal magnetism.
9. The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress
come slanting, so the seams and joints of a
coffin are made on the bevel.
10. You can see by an old grave that the
earth sinks down on the bevel.
11. While in a natural hole it sinks by the center,
the stress being up-and-down.
12. So I made it on the bevel.
13. It makes a neater job.
Now I can get them teeth
Folks seem to get away from the olden right
teaching that says to drive the nails
down and trim the edges well
always like it was for
your own use and
comfort you
were making
it.
~ Cash Bundren ~

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