As I Lay Dying Reading Order

As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner is the most formally radical of his major novels — a novel told through fifteen interior monologues by the members of the Bundren family and their neighbors as they transport the body of Addie Bundren from their farm in Yoknapatawpha County to Jefferson, Mississippi for burial, over four days and forty miles in the July heat. Each of the fifteen narrators has their own voice, their own concerns, their own relationships to the death and to the journey; and the novel as a whole constructs the event from these partial, overlapping, sometimes contradicting perspectives without any authoritative external viewpoint. Faulkner wrote the novel in six weeks while working night shifts at a power plant, and the virtuosity of its construction — the management of fifteen distinct voices, the coordination of multiple time-frames, the creation of the character of Darl (who goes mad and narrates from an asylum) and Vardaman (the child who announces 'My mother is a fish') — remains astonishing. The novel is simultaneously a tragic account of grief, absurdity, and human endurance; a savage comedy of the rural South; and a formal experiment that has influenced American fiction for nearly a century. Addie Bundren's single interior monologue — the dead woman narrating from inside her coffin — is one of the most extraordinary passages in American fiction.