What Is The Chapter Summary Of As I Lay Dying

Chapter 3

As I Lay Dying As I Lay Dying (1930) in a sense carries forward the themes of The Sound and the Fury: the family, language, madness. The novel can be called a “test case” of narrative form, defying literary conventions of space, time, and narrative voice. There are fifteen narrators, each identified by first name. Eight are from “the town” (Jefferson) or “the hamlet” (Frenchman’s Bend); seven are members of the Bundren family, including Addie who is dead. Though the novel has a simple basic plot structure, the author interlaces it with a complex mix of tragic and grotesquely funny elements. As I Lay Dying is told in fifty-nine monologues of varying length. Most of these monologues represent the thoughts of the Bundrens themselves,

The major obstacles to the journey are trials by flood and fire: a flooded river that they must cross in their wagon and the burning of a barn where Addie’s coffin is sheltered overnight. The action of the novel is compressed into ten days, beginning with the day of Addie’s death and concluding the day after her burial, but occasional flashbacks fill in important episodes in the past. Though the novel may be approached from its characters’ varying points of view; there is no gainsaying the fact that it is Addie who controls the entire

Rachel, Samson’s wife, is upset with Bundrens’ treatment o f Addie’s body: she says, “I just wish that you and him and all the men in the world that torture us alive and flout us dead, dragging us up and down the country - ,” and when Samson is trying to soothe her, she repeatedly exclaims, “[d]ont you touch me” (117). Rachel’s utterance, although not quite articulated, shows a glimpse o f the collective experience o f the women who lived in the small farms in Mississippi in the early twentieth century. Yet, this response is not registered as something meaningful and understandable in the dominant signifying system. Samson thinks to himself, “You [men] can’t tell about them [women]”