Analysis of Addie in the Novel "As I Lay Dying"

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This is a story of a journey, the adventures on the road that creates disconcert. Having died while a son sawed her coffin beneath her window, Addie Bundren is carried away in the family wagon through the road of yoknapatawpha. The family wanted to pleases her wish to be buried near her blood relatives in the Jefferson. Nothing goes well, their journey, like their spiritual life, is empty and confused. All the family members have their own reasons and motives for the journey, as they pass through unfortunate accidents both comic and terrible, fire and flood, suffering and stupidity, until at least, they reach the town. The rotten corpse is buried, Dewey Dell fails in her effort to get an abortion, Cash is badly injured, Darl has gone to a mental institution, and at the very end, and the father suddenly remarries to another woman. The various ways each Bundren family member deal with Addie's death is related to Addie's view of each child. In analyzing Addie's behavior, her understanding of life, maternity and sexuality we can determine that she represents not only the stereotyping but the feeling of revenge and defiant, that lead us to understand why her children react the way they do. (sparknotes.com)

Indeed, Addie in As I Lay Dying is, on the surface, portrayed as incompetent, unfulfilled, and dead. Most of what we know about her we learn from the narration of the other characters in the novel, including her husband and her children. Addie is an unhappy schoolteacher, who uses physical punishment in an attempt to establish a relationship with others. She also comments that she cannot wait for the last of them to leave and thus be free to go to the spring, which serves to her as a source of relaxation and retreat. She ...

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...e, it is a burden and overwhelming life.

By the end of the novel, however, laughter seems to be the only response. After spending nine days passing through all kinds of adversities in order to bring Addie's corpse to its final resting place, the funeral process ended in a scene that is described in less than two lines. All we hear of the actual burial is: "we got it filled and covered " ( ). The same sentence then describes how Darl is betrayed by his family and sent away to a Jackson's institution. The few remaining sections focus not the family's loss or on their sadness on burying the family matriarch, but on the individual motives that were the real driving force behind the journey. The introduction of the new Mrs. Bundren provides one of the biggest laughs in the novel,yet somehow such an ending hardly seems like a celebration of life's victory over death.

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