Voices in Motion: My Uneasy Pilgrimage Through Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
4 stars
Reading William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was like trying to follow a chorus where every voice sings in a different key. At first, I was disoriented by the shifting perspectives—each chapter told by a different member of the Bundren family, and even by those around them. But slowly, I began to feel the rhythm of their fractured storytelling, and it drew me in.
The novel follows the Bundrens as they journey to bury their matriarch, Addie, in her hometown. On the surface, it is a story of duty and family loyalty. Yet, for me, it quickly became something much deeper: an exploration of grief, pride, selfishness, and the strange ways love and obligation collide.
What unsettled me most was how raw and unfiltered the voices were. Some spoke with bitterness, others with confusion, some with heartbreaking simplicity. I felt closest to Darl, whose eerie sensitivity made me uneasy, as …
Reading William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was like trying to follow a chorus where every voice sings in a different key. At first, I was disoriented by the shifting perspectives—each chapter told by a different member of the Bundren family, and even by those around them. But slowly, I began to feel the rhythm of their fractured storytelling, and it drew me in.
The novel follows the Bundrens as they journey to bury their matriarch, Addie, in her hometown. On the surface, it is a story of duty and family loyalty. Yet, for me, it quickly became something much deeper: an exploration of grief, pride, selfishness, and the strange ways love and obligation collide.
What unsettled me most was how raw and unfiltered the voices were. Some spoke with bitterness, others with confusion, some with heartbreaking simplicity. I felt closest to Darl, whose eerie sensitivity made me uneasy, as if he could see too much. And Dewey Dell’s quiet desperation left me with a knot in my chest.
Faulkner’s language is challenging—sometimes fragmented, sometimes poetic—but I realized that the difficulty mirrors the experience of grief itself: chaotic, contradictory, impossible to pin down.
When I closed the book, I didn’t feel closure. I felt dust, sweat, and exhaustion, as though I had walked with the Bundrens myself. As I Lay Dying isn’t comforting, but it is unforgettable. It showed me that even in dissonance, a haunting kind of truth can emerge.
