As I Lay Dying: Chapter Analysis

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is narrated by fifteen characters, each of them taking turns telling the story in streams of consciousness. The vivid imagery, simple diction, and syntactic elements used in Vardaman’s chapter beginning on page 214 illustrate an innocent, obscure interpretation of the events happening in the story as a young child tries to understand the death of his mother.
The chapter begins with young Vardaman placing his ear against his mother’s coffin in an effort to hear what she is saying. Accompanied by his older brother, Vardaman simply repeats the words out of Darl’s mouth in the form of a question. Darl comments that Addie is calling on God to help her. Vardaman simply changes the arrangement of the words to formulate a question as to why Addie is calling God to help her. This simple rearrangement of words emphasizes Vardaman’s youth and desperation to discover answers that may help him to understand death.

After finishing his conversation with his dead mother, Vardaman returns to check on Cash.

Confused and unaware of the how serious Cash’s broken leg is, Vardaman only claims that “Cash is sick in his leg” (Faulkner 215). His simple word choice alerts the reader that Vardaman is still very young and likely unable to cope with chaotic events happening around him. With concise sentence structure, Vardaman continues to describe the events of that day in chronological order. He is grasping onto facts that he knows to be true in an effort to cope with the loss of his mother. As the family settles down on their palette to sleep, Vardaman vividly describes the scenery. He insists that the moon is shining on their legs and that his family “will lie half in the white and half in the black” (Faulkner 216). Once again, Varaman is concentrating on the facts that are clear to him rather than try to understand the ones foreign to

him.
Faulkner chooses to have Vardaman communicate through simple facts and curiosity. After staring at the moon and thinking of his mother, Vardaman turns to Dewey Dell. He asks her when Christmas will come. Although he doesn’t voice it aloud just yet, Vardaman is thinking of the toy train that he wants more than anything. He thinks, “It goes round and round on the shining track” several times while talking to Dewey Dell (Faulkner 216). Vardaman then says, “It made my heart hurt” in reference to the train that he will never have because he isn’t a town boy (Faulkner 216). His simple sentences full of childlike desires remind the reader that the youngest Bundren is struggling to deal with grief for the first time.
The last paragraph of the chapter serves to give the reader a brief insight to an upcoming event. Intrigued by the mystery of where the buzzards disappear to at night, Vardaman resolves to find them. Vardaman’s run-on sentence, a contrast to his usual short sentence structure, tells the reader that he waited for everyone to fall asleep, left to find out where the buzzards stay at night, and saw something that Dewey Dell told him to keep quiet about. Faulkner’s careful selection of how much to reveal through an unstable, unreliable narrator like Vardaman allows the reader to formulate their own perceptions before discovering the truth.