Reading Order
As I Lay DyingWilliam Faulkner As I Lay Dying Reading Order
William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930) is his most formally inventive short novel — fifteen narrators, including the dead Addie Bundren herself, telling the story of the Bundren family's journey across Mississippi to bury their matriarch in Jefferson. Darkly comic, tragic, grotesque, and formally brilliant, it was written in six weeks while Faulkner was working night shifts at a power plant, and it remains one of the most audacious formal experiments in American fiction.
Where to start
As I Lay Dying
Complete As I Lay Dying Book List
- 1Buy
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner·1930·Start here — Faulkner's most accessible difficult novel and the most immediately engaging of his major works; the fifteen narrators and the darkly comic journey are easier to enter than The Sound and the Fury's more abstract formal experiment. - 2Buy
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner·1929·The companion piece to As I Lay Dying in Faulkner's early period — the Compson family's disintegration told through four perspectives, including the extraordinary first section from Benjy's cognitively impaired perspective; the essential next Faulkner after As I Lay Dying. - 3Buy
Light in August
William Faulkner·1932·The most accessible of Faulkner's major novels and the one that most explicitly states the moral vision that As I Lay Dying enacts through its darkly comic form; the contrast between the two novels shows the range of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha world. - 4Buy
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf·1925·Woolf's novel — with its multiple interior monologues, its collapse of time, and its interest in how individual consciousness shapes perceived reality — is the British parallel to Faulkner's formal experiments; the comparison between As I Lay Dying and Mrs Dalloway shows the transatlantic reach of literary modernism's formal revolution. - 5Buy
The Road
Cormac McCarthy·2006·McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's journey through a dead landscape shares As I Lay Dying's portrait of a family journey that is simultaneously practical and mythic, and its prose style — short, declarative, stripped of conventional punctuation — draws directly on Faulkner's influence.
As I Lay Dying — Frequently Asked Questions
What is As I Lay Dying about?
The novel follows the Bundren family — Anse (the father), his children Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman — as they transport the body of the matriarch Addie to Jefferson, forty miles away, to be buried according to her wishes. The journey is complicated by a flooded river, a broken wagon, a barn fire, maggots in the coffin, and the various private agendas of the family members. Each of the fifteen narrators tells a different version of the same events, and the novel's formal argument is that there is no single truth about any human experience — only perspectives, partial and distorted by individual need and understanding.
What does Vardaman's chapter "My mother is a fish" mean?
Vardaman Bundren's famous one-sentence chapter — 'My mother is a fish' — is Faulkner's most extreme example of a child's attempt to process death through available analogical structures. Vardaman has recently caught and killed a fish; when his mother dies, he tries to understand her death by mapping it onto the fish's death. The equation is both wrong and, in its childlike way, psychologically accurate: he understands that something that was alive is now dead, and the fish is the thing most recently dead in his experience. The chapter is simultaneously tragic and darkly funny, which is the tonal register As I Lay Dying sustains throughout.
Is As I Lay Dying easier than The Sound and the Fury?
Generally yes — most readers find As I Lay Dying more immediately accessible. The Sound and the Fury's first section (narrated by the cognitively impaired Benjy) is more radically disorienting than any section of As I Lay Dying, and the movement between the novel's four sections requires more reconstruction of temporal sequence. As I Lay Dying is formally innovative — fifteen narrators, including the dead Addie — but the narrative itself (a family traveling to bury their mother) is more immediately graspable, and the darkly comic elements make the difficulty more engaging.
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