As Mother Lays Dying, the Family Struggles with Personal Identity

A tale of perhaps the most chaotic family in literature, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying reveals multiple truths about family dynamics, including how individuality is very nature lenient, mainly toward the mother's influence. The death of their mother causes each Bundren family member to struggle with their individuality a midst the rest of their kin as they attempt to fulfill one collective promise to her, carrying her coffin to Jefferson for burial.

Faulkner, in the cases of two of Addie's sons, Jewel and Vardaman, uses the motif of two animals, a horse and a fish, to quite directly characterize the nature of their identities and connection with "mother". Jewel is a wild spirit and a man of action, he loves in his own way, sternly but sincerely. "Your mother is a horse," Darl says of Jewel, reflecting upon the relationship Jewel and his steed share. Faulkner comments on the inevitability of shared traits between a mother and child as the mirror image of Jewel and his horse is described as a mother-son relation. Vardaman, just before Addie's death, catches and cleans a fish for her. Through this action, he associates his mother with the gift, perhaps as an attempt to cling to her dying body by offering a sort of reincarnation option. Seeing the fish chopped and cooked for dinner, Vardaman slips into an incoherent babbling state for the remainder of the journey, intermittently exclaiming or muttering, "My mother is a fish." His connection with Addie must have been great, as her death and the death of his reincarnation of her leaves him amiss, unsure of who he belongs to and who he possibly could be.

The children's' relationships with Anse, their father, is much less emphasized. They inherited his selfishness in that the journey to Addie's eventual grave becomes an opportunity for errand running, but Anse's caliber of laziness is unmatched.

Faulkner's dominant character, who, ironically, happens to be dead, brings forward an interesting sub-question to my question of nurture. Does the mother have more of an influence than the father? In this case of the spunky, demanding Addie Bundren, an strong argument for the power of a mother's relationship with her children's future identities can be made.