As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying is a novel by the American writer William Faulkner, published in 1930. It was his fifth novel, and its title comes from a translation of Homer's Odyssey that Faulkner knew.

The book tells the story of Addie Bundren's death and the family's attempt to bury her in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, as she asked. Her son Cash builds her coffin in her sight; her husband Anse waits on the porch; and the other children, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell and Vardaman, each carry their own reasons for what they do on the journey that follows. The trip is a disaster from the start, and the family's poverty, its resentments and the selfishness of some of its members are all exposed by the practical problems of moving a body through the countryside in bad weather. Addie's own voice is heard once, in the middle of the book, and what she says revises everything the family has said about her.

Faulkner uses fifteen narrators and fifty-nine chapters, with some sections no longer than a single sentence, and the technique lets him keep the reader inside each family member's version of the same events.