Human beings are by no means dignified. We are far from it, and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a forty-mile journey undertaken to prove this uncomfortable proposition. Humans are perpetually afraid of death and powerless before corruption. We often dress ourselves up as though we were magnificent and extraordinary beings. Yet the journey of Faulkner's Bundren family is merely the story of people engulfed in the stench of a rotting corpse.
The premise of As I Lay Dying is simple: the Bundren family travels across the rural American South to fulfill the dying wish of Addie Bundren, the mother, who wanted to be buried in her hometown. But every incident along the way is brutally bleak. Almost as soon as the journey begins, heavy rain destroys a bridge. Their attempt to cross the river wrecks the wagon, and the horses are swept away. Cash, the eldest son, breaks his leg. By the final chapter, the family's only daughter has been sexually assaulted, and, more absurdly still, Anse Bundren, the father, ends the story by bringing home a new wife. No member of the family emerges unscathed. All are victims and, at the same time, perpetrators.
Faulkner's decision to create such a merciless setting is not unrelated to the Southern reality he witnessed. He spent his life in the American South, and his writing naturally focuses on the decline of its rural communities in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The hardships and humiliations suffered by the Bundrens can be read within this context. It was an era when traditional Southern values such as honor and familial devotion had become little more than empty shells amid poverty. Faulkner expresses this historical confusion and material deprivation through the characters' degradation and decline. The novel's events, therefore, are not detached from the reality of their time.
What I discerned in this context is the limitation of human beings. We are truly fragile creatures, inherently capable of evil and destined to die. Human limitations appear most starkly in two forms: death and corruption. Before both, we are helpless. Death strips us of every possibility, while moral degradation deprives us of the justification to move forward. Addie Bundren spent her life bound to her husband, Anse. Such a life may have been common in that era, but it was certainly not an easy one. The absurdity of her existence reaches its height in death, when she can do nothing but decay inside a narrow coffin. Even after his son's leg is broken, the father foolishly pours cement over it. His daughter, seeking contraception, is sexually assaulted by a local medical worker. The father then proudly introduces a new wife to his children. Why does Faulkner expose human nature so ruthlessly? His purpose seems quite clear.
Ultimately, Faulkner makes us confront this side of ourselves so that we may see what we really are. He wants us to finish the novel thinking, “So this is how deeply human beings can fall.” This is not a mindless denunciation of human nature. Rather, it expresses the hope that we might overcome our nature and its limitations. Life is profoundly absurd. Nobody chooses to be born exactly as they are, nor does anyone necessarily choose the circumstances in which they must live. Precisely for that reason, however, we must face the absurdity directly. Only when we recognize what we are and how far we can fall can we find the courage to embrace life's absurdity. To speak too hastily of hope or dignity would be a deception. What we can do is look directly at our own corruption and limitations. Only by confronting absurdity can we truly live. This is neither nihilism nor extreme optimism. It is simply reality: our struggle to keep living somehow, and perhaps the only hope we can reasonably hold.