The After-Dinner Payback

I finished William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying the other night and I don’t even know what to think of it. It’s a book that seems mired in contradiction: it’s funny, in a depressing way. There’s a story and a semblance of a plot, but it’s buried under Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness style. I really had no idea what was going on and the more I read, the confused I became, while earlier episodes started making sense. I liked it—but not really. It’s one of those rare books that completely fucks with your head, that leaves you wondering what the hell you just read.

I suppose As I Lay Dying isn’t really a novel so much as a collection of emotions. Faulkner jumps from character to character, with the book literally making you feel as though you were looking out from behind someone’s eyes. Seemingly random sentences—thoughts, in other words—crash together in a jumble. Characters aren’t often identified by name—and why should they be, when they already know each other?—so readers are left to puzzle out who is who based on behavior and speech patterns. Faulkner’s characterization is so true-to-life that reading the book can be stomach-churning—after all, who hasn’t known someone as stubborn as Anse, as impatient as Jewel, as naive as Dewey Dell, as two-faced as Darl? Indeed, what family isn’t as dysfunctional as the Bundren clan?

The genius of Faulkner’s novel—and the reason for all the ambivalence—isn’t because of the story (which is, admittedly, a comedy so black that any humor may be lost amidst the welter of tragedy), or the atmosphere of resigned helpnessness (as encapsulated by Tull’s statement that “[n]obody can’t guard against the hand of God”), but because of the characters. Faulkner probes the inner mind with all the subtlety of a doctor wielding a chainsaw. He doesn’t reveal his characters patiently—he screams, “Gotcha!” and rips the sheet off, exposing them in all their nakedness. And really, As I Lay Dying is so intimate that it’s almost like being violated—in forcing you to look at his characters, drawn in all their infuriatingly human glory, Faulkner forces you to look at yourself in the same light.