As I Lay Dying
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50 free As I Lay Dying trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying follows the Bundrens, a poor farming family, as they haul their mother's coffin across flooded country to honor her final wish. Told in short chapters by family members, neighbors and strangers, it is funny, grim and far stranger than a plot summary suggests, which is why it turns up on so many reading lists. This quiz moves through the book much as a reader meets it: the deathbed scenes at the farm, the river crossing, the long detour, and what each member of the family is really after once the wagon reaches its destination. Other questions cover how the novel is built, the moments and sayings readers remember, the man who wrote it, and the film, music and later fiction that borrowed from it. It is written for students checking their reading, at the midpoint or after the final page, for teachers who want ready-made multiple-choice questions, and for book clubs. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through or print the set.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In As I Lay Dying, what does young Vardaman Bundren declare his mother to be after her death?
A fish
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.
Q 02In As I Lay Dying, Addie Bundren makes Anse promise to bury her among her own kin in which town?
Jefferson
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.
Q 03Standing over his wife's body in As I Lay Dying, Anse Bundren says he can now get what?
False teeth
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.
Q 04What does Darl Bundren set on fire near the end of As I Lay Dying, hoping to end the journey?
A barn
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.
Q 05In As I Lay Dying, what do the Bundrens pour around Cash's broken leg as a homemade cast?
Cement
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.
Q 06What is unusual about the one chapter that Addie Bundren herself narrates in As I Lay Dying?
She has already died
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.
Q 07Why does young Vardaman Bundren bore holes through the lid of his mother's coffin in As I Lay Dying?
To give her air
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.
Q 08Which actor directed the 2013 film of As I Lay Dying and cast himself as Darl Bundren?
James Franco
James Franco wrote the script with a fellow Yale graduate student, Matt Rager, taking on a novel long described as impossible to film.
Q 09The band As I Lay Dying, formed in San Diego and named after the novel, plays which style of music?
Metalcore
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.
Q 10At the end of As I Lay Dying, what does Anse Bundren do the morning after his wife's burial?
Remarries
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.
Q 11What is Dewey Dell Bundren secretly desperate to obtain in town in As I Lay Dying?
An abortion
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.
Q 12In As I Lay Dying, what work did Addie Bundren do before she married the farmer Anse?
Schoolteacher
A schoolteacher who hated her pupils, she married Anse after he kept driving four miles out of his way to pass the schoolhouse.
Q 13As I Lay Dying is a landmark of which modernist technique, used by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf?
Stream of consciousness
Q 21After the fire in As I Lay Dying, Darl Bundren is put on a train to an asylum in which city?
Jackson
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.
Q 22In As I Lay Dying, Anse Bundren swaps Jewel's beloved horse for what after the river crossing?
A team of mules
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.
Q 23In As I Lay Dying, Anse Bundren tells people he will die if he ever does what?
Breaks a sweat
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.
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.
Q 14As I Lay Dying is set in which fictional Mississippi county that William Faulkner called apocryphal?
Yoknapatawpha
Yoknapatawpha is a fictional rendering of Lafayette County, the writer's real home, and the setting of many of his other books.
Q 15As I Lay Dying was Faulkner's next novel after which 1929 book partly narrated by Benjy Compson?
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury had won critical praise but was not a commercial success when Faulkner turned to the Bundrens' story.
Q 16Which honor for 1949 went to William Faulkner, the author of As I Lay Dying, for his novels?
The Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949 reached him a year late, at the 1950 banquet, where Bertrand Russell collected that year's award.
Q 17As I Lay Dying, with its decaying corpse and grim humor, belongs to which American literary genre?
Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is the usual label for the book, though it is also classed as a modernist novel and a black comedy.
Q 18In As I Lay Dying, a storm just after Addie's death destroys what, forcing a risky river crossing?
The bridges
The bridges are washed out by the rising water, so the wagon tries an old ford instead and the current drags it off.
Q 19Each of the 59 chapters of As I Lay Dying is headed by nothing except what?
The narrator's name
The narrator's name is the only signpost, so readers piece the plot together from fifteen clashing voices, with Darl heard most often.
Q 20In As I Lay Dying, which man had the secret affair with Addie Bundren that produced her son Jewel?
Whitfield
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.
Q 24The title As I Lay Dying comes from a murdered king's speech in the underworld in which epic?
The Odyssey
The Odyssey has the ghost of Agamemnon recall his own murder, and Faulkner took the phrase from a 1925 English translation.
Q 25In As I Lay Dying, what strikes the Bundren wagon in midstream and throws the coffin into the river?
A floating log
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.
Q 26In As I Lay Dying, the capsules a drugstore clerk gives Dewey Dell Bundren are filled with what?
Talcum powder
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.
Q 27In As I Lay Dying, which man gives Dewey Dell Bundren a ten-dollar bill before the journey to town?
Lafe
Lafe, her partner in the cotton rows, hands over the money and tells her a drugstore will sell her what she needs.
Q 28Which respectable druggist in As I Lay Dying refuses Dewey Dell Bundren's request and lectures her?
Moseley
Moseley keeps the drugstore in a town the family passes through, and he sends her away with a sermon and nothing else.
Q 29In As I Lay Dying, the flood forces the Bundrens to detour through which town south of the county?
Mottson
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.
Q 30Which heavyset doctor in As I Lay Dying must be hauled up the bluff by rope to reach Addie Bundren?
Peabody
Peabody weighs 225 pounds and arrives too late to do more than watch her die, because Anse put off sending for him.