50 Fun Facts About As I Lay Dying

In As I Lay Dying, what does young Vardaman Bundren declare his mother to be after her death?

A fish is how the youngest Bundren makes sense of losing her, and one of his chapters is that single sentence. He had caught a big one that same day.

In As I Lay Dying, Addie Bundren makes Anse promise to bury her among her own kin in which town?

Jefferson is the end of a forty-mile trek that takes the family's wagon nine days, because a storm has flooded the river in between.

Standing over his wife's body in As I Lay Dying, Anse Bundren says he can now get what?

False teeth are Anse's private reason for hauling the coffin to town, and he buys a set there with money taken from his daughter.

What does Darl Bundren set on fire near the end of As I Lay Dying, hoping to end the journey?

A barn sheltering the coffin for the night goes up in flames, but Jewel drags his mother's body out and burns his back doing it.

In As I Lay Dying, what do the Bundrens pour around Cash's broken leg as a homemade cast?

Cement goes straight onto his bare skin and causes a horrible infection. When a doctor finally removes it, a large patch of skin comes away too.

What is unusual about the one chapter that Addie Bundren herself narrates in As I Lay Dying?

She has already died when her voice arrives, well into the journey, to look back on her unhappy marriage. The book has fifteen voices in all.

Why does young Vardaman Bundren bore holes through the lid of his mother's coffin in As I Lay Dying?

To give her air, he fills the lid with holes overnight, and the family wakes to find that two of them go straight into her face.

Which actor directed the 2013 film of As I Lay Dying and cast himself as Darl Bundren?

James Franco wrote the script with a fellow Yale graduate student, Matt Rager, taking on a novel long described as impossible to film.

The band As I Lay Dying, formed in San Diego and named after the novel, plays which style of music?

Metalcore fans may know the title better than readers do. Singer Tim Lambesis borrowed it from Faulkner, though the songs are not based on the book.

At the end of As I Lay Dying, what does Anse Bundren do the morning after his wife's burial?

He remarries, walking up with a woman he met while borrowing shovels to dig the grave and introducing her to his stunned children as Mrs. Bundren.

What is Dewey Dell Bundren secretly desperate to obtain in town in As I Lay Dying?

An abortion is her hidden reason for making the trip. She is seventeen and pregnant, and of her family only her brother Darl has guessed.

In As I Lay Dying, what work did Addie Bundren do before she married the farmer Anse?

A schoolteacher who hated her pupils, she married Anse after he kept driving four miles out of his way to pass the schoolhouse.

As I Lay Dying is a landmark of which modernist technique, used by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf?

Stream of consciousness puts readers inside each speaker's unfiltered thoughts. Faulkner had first tried it a year earlier, in his novel about the Compson family.

As I Lay Dying is set in which fictional Mississippi county that William Faulkner called apocryphal?

Yoknapatawpha is a fictional rendering of Lafayette County, the writer's real home, and the setting of many of his other books.

As I Lay Dying was Faulkner's next novel after which 1929 book partly narrated by Benjy Compson?

The Sound and the Fury had won critical praise but was not a commercial success when Faulkner turned to the Bundrens' story.

Which honor for 1949 went to William Faulkner, the author of As I Lay Dying, for his novels?

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949 reached him a year late, at the 1950 banquet, where Bertrand Russell collected that year's award.

As I Lay Dying, with its decaying corpse and grim humor, belongs to which American literary genre?

Southern Gothic is the usual label for the book, though it is also classed as a modernist novel and a black comedy.

In As I Lay Dying, a storm just after Addie's death destroys what, forcing a risky river crossing?

The bridges are washed out by the rising water, so the wagon tries an old ford instead and the current drags it off.

Each of the 59 chapters of As I Lay Dying is headed by nothing except what?

The narrator's name is the only signpost, so readers piece the plot together from fifteen clashing voices, with Darl heard most often.

In As I Lay Dying, which man had the secret affair with Addie Bundren that produced her son Jewel?

Whitfield is the local preacher. He rides to her deathbed meaning to confess, learns she has taken the secret with her, and decides to say nothing.

After the fire in As I Lay Dying, Darl Bundren is put on a train to an asylum in which city?

Jackson, the state capital, was home to Mississippi's insane asylum until 1935. Two men with pistols under their coats take Darl there by train.

In As I Lay Dying, Anse Bundren swaps Jewel's beloved horse for what after the river crossing?

A team of mules replaces the pair that drowned in the flood. Jewel had paid for the horse himself, and Anse makes the deal without asking him.

In As I Lay Dying, Anse Bundren tells people he will die if he ever does what?

He never breaks a sweat, a rule he dates to falling sick in the sun as a young man, so his neighbors and children end up doing the work.

The title As I Lay Dying comes from a murdered king's speech in the underworld in which epic?

The Odyssey has the ghost of Agamemnon recall his own murder, and Faulkner took the phrase from a 1925 English translation.

In As I Lay Dying, what strikes the Bundren wagon in midstream and throws the coffin into the river?

A floating log rears up out of the flood and knocks the wagon over. Jewel helps haul the coffin back to the bank, and Cash comes out with a broken leg.

In As I Lay Dying, the capsules a drugstore clerk gives Dewey Dell Bundren are filled with what?

Talcum powder is all that the clerk, Skeet MacGowan, puts in them, and he coerces her into sex in the store's cellar in exchange.

In As I Lay Dying, which man gives Dewey Dell Bundren a ten-dollar bill before the journey to town?

Lafe, her partner in the cotton rows, hands over the money and tells her a drugstore will sell her what she needs.

Which respectable druggist in As I Lay Dying refuses Dewey Dell Bundren's request and lectures her?

Moseley keeps the drugstore in a town the family passes through, and he sends her away with a sermon and nothing else.

In As I Lay Dying, the flood forces the Bundrens to detour through which town south of the county?

Mottson is the place Faulkner usually spells Mottstown. Its people hold handkerchiefs to their noses as the wagon and its eight-day-old burden roll in.

Which heavyset doctor in As I Lay Dying must be hauled up the bluff by rope to reach Addie Bundren?

Peabody weighs 225 pounds and arrives too late to do more than watch her die, because Anse put off sending for him.

In As I Lay Dying, what does Cash Bundren plan to buy in town with the eight dollars he brings?

A graphophone, an early record player, is the one luxury the practical eldest son lets himself want, because he likes music.

Darl Bundren's rich vocabulary in As I Lay Dying is sometimes traced to service in which conflict?

The First World War took him to France, and scholars cite that trip to explain how a hill farmer comes to describe things as cubistic.

In the early chapters of As I Lay Dying, what does neighbor Cora Tull bake to sell to a town lady?

Cakes made for a rich lady's party go unsold when the party is called off, and her daughter Kate grumbles that rich town ladies can back out when they like.

Cash Bundren's first chapter in As I Lay Dying, on how he built the coffin, takes what unusual form?

A numbered list sets out his reasons for cutting the joints on the bevel, the way a careful craftsman would explain himself.

William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying during night shifts at what kind of university workplace?

A power plant stoker's job at the University of Mississippi left him quiet hours after midnight, and he wrote the manuscript by hand.

William Faulkner claimed he drafted As I Lay Dying in six weeks and then did what to the text?

He left it untouched, or so he boasted two years later in an introduction to his novel Sanctuary.

Which star of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs plays Anse Bundren in the 2013 film As I Lay Dying?

Tim Blake Nelson leads a cast that includes Beth Grant as the dying Addie and Jim Parrack as her eldest son, Cash.

The town where Addie Bundren is buried in As I Lay Dying is modeled on which real Mississippi town?

Oxford became Faulkner's home when he was four, just before his fifth birthday, and stayed his base for life; he simply renamed it for his fiction.

Jewel Bundren's horse in As I Lay Dying is tied to which family from a later Faulkner trilogy?

Snopes horses came from Texas with Flem Snopes, who had them auctioned off, a tale Faulkner retold in the story Spotted Horses and in The Hamlet.

What are Darl and Jewel Bundren away hauling for three dollars when Addie dies in As I Lay Dying?

Lumber is the load, and a broken wheel strands them in the rain, which keeps the coffin waiting three days for the wagon.

How does Jewel Bundren secretly earn the money for his horse in As I Lay Dying?

Clearing land by lantern for a neighbor took him five months of nights, and his brothers, seeing him worn out, assumed he was meeting a woman.

How does Darl Bundren refer to himself in his final chapter of As I Lay Dying, aboard the train?

In the third person, as if watching a stranger, he describes Darl laughing all the way to the asylum.

In her own chapter of As I Lay Dying, Addie Bundren says her burial request was meant as what?

Revenge on Anse is how she puts it: she extracted the promise after her second son was born, and he was never to know what it was for.

In As I Lay Dying, Addie Bundren's chapter voices a deep distrust of what, which she finds empty?

Words, she decides, sit too far from lived experience to express it, so for her only action counts.

Which 1996 Booker Prize winner by Graham Swift was written as a homage to As I Lay Dying?

Last Orders sends a group of London friends to Margate to scatter a dead man's ashes in the sea, as he had asked.

After the wagon overturns in As I Lay Dying, what does Vernon Tull help recover from the river?

Carpentry tools are Cash's obsession. He frames nearly everything he says in terms of his craft, so the men go back into the water for them.

In As I Lay Dying, how had Cash Bundren broken the same leg once before the river accident?

A fall from a church is one he can still measure: asked how far he dropped, he gives the height to the half inch.

In As I Lay Dying, on whose farm do the Bundrens spend their final night on the road?

Gillespie threatens to sue over what he loses that night unless the family has Darl committed, which settles Darl's fate.

In As I Lay Dying, the Bundrens twice pass a signboard pointing to which burial ground near home?

New Hope is where the Bundrens usually bury their own, less than three miles away, which makes the long haul to Addie's people all the stranger.

With the doctor away in As I Lay Dying, which farmer and horse doctor sets Cash Bundren's leg?

Billy Varner, called Uncle Billy, arrives with his satchel of horse medicine, since he is the nearest thing to a vet in the neighborhood.