Human Nature In Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

In As I Lay Dying the Bundren family faces many hardships dealing with death and physical nature. Nature plays a major role in moving Faulkner’s story. Nature takes a toll on the family in their time of despair of losing a loved one. They are challenged by human nature and the nature of the elements. Throughout the story the family overcomes the human nature of emotions and the nature of the weather. They face nature in the most peculiar ways, like a flood that keeps them from crossing, the decaying body of Addie, and how they all grieve over the death of Addie; Dewey Dell said, “I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish I had time to wish I had” (Faulkner 110). The forces of nature compete with the Burden family.

Instead of functioning as an antidote to death, childbirth seems an introduction to it. For both Addie and Dewey Dell, giving birth is a phenomenon that kills the people closest to it, even if they are still physically alive. Birth becomes for Addie a final obligation, and she sees both Dewey Dell and Vardaman as reparations for the affair that led to Jewel’s conception, the last debts she must pay before preparing herself for death. Which is nature playing a big role of life and death. Dewey Dell’s feelings about pregnancy are no more positive, her condition becomes a constant concern, it causes her to view all men as potential sexual predators, and transforms her entire world, as she says in an early section, into a “tub full of guts.” Dewey Dell and Darl mentally communicated about their mothers death new her mother was going to die,” He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without words, and I knew he knew because if he had said he knew with the words I would not have believed that he had been there and saw us”(Faulkner 96). Birth seems to spell out a prescribed death for women and, by proxy, the metaphorical deaths of their entire