As I Lay Dying

Darl and Jewel walk back from the fields toward the farmhouse. Darl observes Jewel precisely, recording his movements with preternatural clarity. Cash is visible outside, building the coffin.

Cora Tull, a neighbor woman, sits with the dying Addie and reflects on her eggs, her cakes, and her piety, offering a portrait of rural female religiosity — and consistently misreading the Bundren family.

Darl narrates events he is not physically present for — describing his mother's death as it occurs while he and Jewel are miles away loading lumber.

Vardaman, the youngest Bundren child, has caught and butchered a large fish just before his mother dies. He equates the fish with his mother in a desperate act of childhood logic.

Dewey Dell fans her dying mother and thinks almost entirely about her own pregnancy — her desperation to reach Jefferson, her resentment of Darl who she knows already knows.

Cash's first chapter is a numbered list: thirteen reasons why he built the coffin on the bevel. Nothing else.

Anse reflects on roads, his bad luck, and his determination to honor his promise to bury Addie in Jefferson — while revealing his passivity, self-pity, and hidden motivations.

The Bundrens attempt to ford the flooded Yoknapatawpha River with Addie's coffin on the wagon. The wagon overturns, mules drown, Cash's leg is broken, and the coffin goes downstream.

Jewel's only solo chapter — a violent fantasy of isolation with his mother on a hilltop, killing anyone who approaches or observes.

Addie's only chapter — narrated impossibly from beyond death — reveals her philosophy of language, her affair with Whitfield, the true reason she demanded burial in Jefferson, and her accounting of each child.

Whitfield, Jewel's actual father, rushes urgently toward Jefferson to confess his adultery to Anse — then learns Addie has already died and immediately decides the intention to confess is sufficient.

The Bundrens shelter overnight at the Gillespies'. Darl sets fire to the barn where the coffin rests. Jewel saves the coffin by carrying it through the flames on his back. Dewey Dell attacks Darl.

Darl is taken by force to the train that will carry him to the Jackson asylum. He refers to himself in the third person and laughs — 'yes yes yes yes yes yes.'

Cash, narrating near the novel's end, inventories the trip's damage: his broken leg, Darl's commitment, Dewey Dell's failed abortion attempt. He tries to be fair to everyone.

The journey ends. Addie is buried. Anse returns to the wagon with new teeth and a new wife — the woman who lent him the shovels — introducing her simply as 'Mrs. Bundren.'