As I Lay Dying
As I Lay DyingWilliam Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a novel about how the conflicting agendas within a family tear it apart.
Every member of the family is to a degree responsible for
what goes wrong, but none more than Anse. Anse's
laziness and selfishness are the underlying factors to every
disaster in the book.
As the critic Andre Bleikasten agrees, "there is scarcely a
character in Faulkner so loaded with faults and vices"
(84).
At twenty-two Anse becomes sick from working in the sun
after which he refuses to work claiming he will die if he
ever breaks a sweat again. Anse becomes lazy, and turns
Addie into a baby factory in order to have children to do
all the work. Addie is inbittered by this, and is never the
same. Anse is begrudging of everything. Even the cost of a
doctor for his dying wife seems money better spent on
false teeth to him. "I never sent for you" Anse says "I take
you to witness I never sent for you" (37) he repeats trying
to avoid a doctor's fee.
Before she dies Addie requests to be buried in Jefferson.
When she does, Anse appears obsessed with burying her
there. Even after Addie had been dead over a week, and
all of the bridges to Jefferson are washed out, he is still
determined to get to Jefferson.
Is Anse sincere in wanting to fulfill his promise to Addie,
or is he driven by another motive? Anse plays "to
perfection the role of the grief-stricken widower"
(Bleikasten 84) while secretly thinking only of getting
another wife and false teeth in Jefferson. When it becomes
necessary to drive the wagon across the river, he proves
himself to be undeniably lazy as he makes Cash, Jewel,
and Darl drive the wagon across while he walks over the
bridge, a spectator.
Anse is also stubborn; he could have borrowed a team of
mules from Mr. Armstid, but he insists that Addie would
not have...
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