Addie Bundren In As I Lay Dying

Many authors have numerous factors that influence their works. Real life experiences can have a great impact on the tone, plot, and settings of a work of literature. The life of William Faulkner reads like one of his novels – a tale of rage, alcoholism, and adultery, with periods of great poverty followed by wealth and great love followed by loss (Padgett, 1). His experiences and home life have had drastic effect on his works As I Lay Dying and The Reviers. Faulkner frequently noted that he used “experience, observation, and imagination” in creating his characters and plots; and though he always insisted that the imagination was the key component, he also acknowledged the personal element in his work. As a result, outrageous, absurd, or outlandish

In fact, the characterization of Addie Bundren may be modeled in part on two individuals whom Faulkner knew very well: his mother and himself. Maud Falkner, his mother, was an intelligent, well-educated, talented, and strong-willed woman who was married to a husband who was never much of a success in anything he attempted. To make matters worse, Murry Falkner, his father, was an alcoholic who frequently withdrew into long periods of apathy and self-pity. In her final illness, at age 88, Maud asked her son if she would have to see her husband in heaven. “No, not if you don’t want to,” Faulkner told her. “That’s good,” she replied; I never did like him.” This is quite similar to what Vernon Tull says of Addie: “Wherever she went, she has her reward in being free of Anse Bundren.” Also, leading up to his marriage with Estelle, even though Faulkner was reluctant, the couple was in fact married in 1929. From the very start, however, it became obvious that this would be a troubled marriage: Estelle, drinking heavily and still emotionally wounded from her previous marriage and divorce, attempted to drown herself in the Gulf of Mexico on the honeymoon (Hamblin, 1). Addie Bundren’s disillusionment and despair in As I Lay Dying, set down just five months after Faulkner’s marriage to Estelle, may as well be Faulkner’s own. Addie may also be speaking for Faulkner in other

One example of this is Addie’s death and the family’s week-long effort to move her body from rural southern Yoknapatawpha County to Jefferson, over forty miles distant, for burial in her father’s family plot. The action is an absurdly extended funeral procession, complicated by a river in violent flood, as well as a series of misjudgments and bizarre acts by the Bundrens. Add on the abnormal funerary process of Addie Bundren, and the whole journey is quite bizarre. However, the real journey a reader takes in this book is not to Jefferson but deep inside the complex, conflicted, and often nightmarish thoughts of the characters. Darl’s brooding questions about identity and reality, Jewel’s pent-up anger and desire for revenge, Cash’s obsession with neatness and order, Dewey Dell’s anxiety over her personal circumstance, Vardaman’s innocent confusion over death and grief, Anse’s inner struggle between inertia and honor, Addie’s frustrations, regrets, and secrets these are the dark, hidden places explored and exposed by Faulkner’s marvelous stream-of-consciousness prose. And while to neighbors like Tull and Samson the Bundrens may appear to be a devoted family unified by a common, if quite absurd and even slightly crazy, cause, the reader knows the other, secret Bundrens: selfish, divided, frightened, dysfunctional, lonely, and, worst of all, unloving and unloved. (Hamblin,