As I Lay Dying (1930)

Summary

Margaret Cheney Dawson. “Beside Addie's Coffin.” New York Herald Tribune Books, October 5, 1930, p. 6.

Given the names: Darl, Jewel, Vardaman, Cash, Dewey Dell and Anse, you might think you were confronted with a comedy of the Herman-Sherman-and-Vermin type. On the contrary, these are the four sons, daughter and husband of a dying woman, Addie Bundren. Outside her window, Cash fashions her coffin. The neighbors come to see her, they sit like buzzards about her and talk. Presently Addie dies. Cash works all night in the pouring rain to finish her coffin. Then they load her onto the wagon and start for Jefferson to bury her with her folks. The rains have washed away the bridges, so they must try the ford. The wagon overturns, the mules are drowned, Cash breaks a leg. But Jewel rescues the coffin. They stop off a night and buy another team. All this takes time. Addie begins to smell. Buzzards sit on the coffin, when they can get at it, but most of the time they cannot because Cash–his leg set in cement–is lying on it. Little Vardaman is half crazy, Darl also. Darl, in fact, sets fire to a barn where the coffin is left one night. Jewel drags it out. Whenever possible Dewey Dell sneaks off to drug stores asking for something to cure her “woman's trouble,” by which she means that she is going to have a child and is not married. But at last they reach Jefferson, bury the rotting corpse, send Darl off to an asylum.

This meaty tale comes to us through the consciousness of first one and then another of the characters.