Episode 23: Hearing Voices in William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING

Great American Novel

William Faulkner's fifth published novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), is a self-described tour de force that the author cranked out in roughly two months while working as the night manager at the University of Mississippi power plant in his hometown of Oxford. This dark tragicomedy about a family on a quest to bury its matriarch helped win the author his early reputation for sadistically heaping woe and misfortune upon his Southern grotesques but has more recently come to be seen as a complex artistic effort to empathize with the often marginalized rural population in America whose supposed primitivism leads to the caricatures found in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, two contemporaneous novels. Telling the story of the Bundren family through fifteen different narrators and a tapestry of styles that weaves dialect with hypnotic poetry, Faulkner crafted a tightly plotted but expansively interiorized tale in which unforgettable characters such as Addie, Darl, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman cope with grief, language, and understanding. If you've ever wondered why the phrase "My mother is a fish" is a meme, this podcast is for you.