Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”

Letteratura Angloamericana 1 LM – Modulo B

As I Lay Dying (1930) - William Faulkner

Monologo di Addie Bundren

In the afternoon when school was out and the last one had left with his little dirty snuffling
nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and
hate them. It would he quiet there then, with the water bubbling up and away and the sun
slanting quiet in the trees and the quiet smelling of damp and rotting leaves and new earth;
especially in the early spring, for it was worst then.
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get
ready to stay dead a long time And when I would have to look at them day after day, “each with
his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other blood and strange to mine,
and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father
for having ever planted me. I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip
them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood
that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me Now I am
something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and
ever.
And so I took Anse. I saw him pass the school house three or four times before I learned that
he was driving four miles out of his way to do it. I noticed then how he was beginning to hump-a
tall man and young-so that he looked already like a tall bird hunched in the cold weather, on the
wagon seat He would pass the school house, the wagon creaking slow, his head turning slow to
watch the door of the school house as the wagon passed, until he went on around the curve and out
of sight. One day I went to the door and stood there when he passed. When he saw me he looked
quickly away and did not look back again.
In the early spring it was worst. Sometimes I thought that I could not bear it, lying in bed at
night, with the wild geese going north and their honking coming faint and high and wild out of the
wild darkness, and during the day it would seem as though I couldn’t wait for the last one to go so I
could go down to the spring. And so when I looked up that day and saw Anse standing there in his
Sunday clothes, turning his hat round and round in his hands, I said:
“If you’ve got any womenfolks, why in the world dont they make you get your hair cut?”
“I aint got none,” he said. Then he said suddenly, driving his eyes at me like two hounds in a
strange yard: “That’s what I come to see you about,”
“And make you hold your shoulders up,” I said. “You haven’t got any? But you’ve got a
house. They tell me you’ve got a house and a good farm. And you live there alone, doing for
yourself, do you?” He just looked at me, turning the hat in his hands. “A new house,” I said. “Are
you going to get married?”
And he said again, holding his eyes to mine: “That’s what I come to see you about.”
Later he told me, “I aint got no people. So that wont be no worry to you. I dont reckon you
can say the same.”
“No. I have people. In Jefferson.”
His face fell a little. “Well, I got a little property. I’m forehanded; I got a good honest name. I
know how town folks are, but maybe when they talk to me . . .”
“They might listen,” I said. “But they’ll be hard to talk to.” He was watching my face.
“They’re in the cemetery.”
“But your living kin,” he said. “They’ll be different.”
“Will they?” I said. “I dont know. I never had any other kind.”
1
 Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”
Letteratura Angloamericana 1 LM – Modulo B
A.A. 2023-24
Marta Lucari
marta.lucari@uniroma2.it

So I took Anse. And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and
that this was the answer to it. That was when I learned that words are no good; that words
dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood
was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children
didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone
that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. I knew that it had been, not that
they had dirty noses, but that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their
mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of
die switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream. I knew that it had. been, not that
my aloneness had to be violated over and over each day, but that it had never been violated
until Cash came. Not even by Anse in the nights.
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I
knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time
Came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it
to me nor I to him, and I would say Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love
or Anse: it didn’t matter.
I would think that even while I lay with him in the dark and Cash asleep in the cradle within
the swing of my hand. I would think that if he were to wake and cry, I would suckle him, too. Anse
or love: it didn’t matter. My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the
violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle.
Then I found that I had Darl. At first I would not believe it. Then I believed that I would
kill Anse. It was as though he had tricked me, hidden within a word like within a paper screen
and struck me in the back through it. But then I realised that I had been tricked by words
older than Anse or love, and that the same word had tricked Anse too, and that my revenge
would be that he would never know I was taking revenge. And when Darl was born I asked
Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had
been right, even when he couldn’t have known he was right anymore than I could have known
I was wrong.
“Nonsense,” Anse said; “you and me aint nigh done chapping yet, with just two.”
He did not know that he was dead, then. Sometimes I would lie by him in the dark,
hearing the land that was now of my blood and flesh, and I would think: Anse. Why Anse.
Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a
shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out
of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape
profoundly without Me like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten
the name of the jar. I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the
shape of a and I couldn’t think Anse, couldn’t remember Anse. It was not that I could think of
myself as no longer unvirgin, because I was three now. And when I would think Cash and Darl that
way until their names would die and solidify into a shape and then fade away, I would say, All
right. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what they call them.
And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words
go straight up in a thin, line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth,
clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle
from one to the other and that sin and love and fear are-just sounds that people who never sinned
nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. Like
Cora, who could never even cook.

2
 Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”
Letteratura Angloamericana 1 LM – Modulo B
A.A. 2023-24
Marta Lucari
marta.lucari@uniroma2.it
She would tell me what I owed to my children and to Anse and to God. I gave Anse the
children. I did not ask for them. I did not even ask him for what he could have given me: not-
Anse. That was my duty to him, to not ask that, and that duty I fulfilled. I would be I; I would

let him be the shape and echo of his word. That was more than he asked, because he could not
have asked for that and been Anse, using himself so with a word.
And then he died. He did not know he was dead. I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the
dark land talking of Cod’s love and His beauty and His sin; hearing the dark voicelessness in which
the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds, that are just the gaps in peoples’
lacks, coming down like the cries of the geese out of the wild darkness in the old terrible nights,
fumbling at the deeds like orphans to whom are pointed out in a crowd two faces and told, That is
your father, your mother. I believed that I had found it.
I believed that the reason was the duty to the alive, to the terrible blood, the red bitter
flood boiling through the land. I would think of sin as I would think of the clothes we both
wore in the world’s face, of the circumspection necessary because he was he and I was I; the
sin the more utter and terrible since he was the instrument ordained by God who created the
sin, to sanctify that sin He had created. While I waited for him in the woods, waiting for him
before he saw me, I would think of him as dressed in sin. I would think of him as thinking of
me as dressed also in sin, he the more beautiful since the garment which he had exchanged for
sin was sanctified. I would think of the sin as garments which we would remove in order to
shape and coerce the terrible blood to the forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air. Then
I would lay with Anse again--I did not lie to him: I just refused, just as I refused my breast to
Cash, and Darl after their time was up--hearing the dark land talking the voiceless speech.
I hid nothing. I tried to deceive no one. I would not have cared. I merely took the precautions
that he thought necessary for his sake, not for my safety, but just as I wore clothes in the world’s
face. And I would think then when Cora talked to me, of how the high dead words in time seemed
to lose even the significance of their dead sound.
Then it was over. Over in the sense that he was gone and I knew that, see him again though I
would, I would never again see him coming swift and secret to me in the woods dressed in sin like a
gallant garment already blowing aside with the speed of his secret coming.
But for me it was not over. I mean, over in the sense of beginning and ending, because to
me there was no beginning nor ending to anything then. I even held Anse refraining still, not
that I was holding him recessional, but as though nothing else had ever been. My children were of
me alone, of the wild blood boiling along the earth, of me and of all that lived; of none and of
all. Then I found that I had Jewel. When I waked to remember to discover it, he was two months
gone.
My father said that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead. I knew at last what
he meant and that he could not have known what he meant himself, because a man cannot know
anything about cleaning up the house afterward. And so I have cleaned my house. With Jewel--I lay
by the lamp, holding up my own head, watching him cap and suture it before he breathed—the wild
blood boiled away and the sound of it ceased. Then there was only the milk, warm and calm, and I
lying calm in the slow silence, getting ready to clean my house.
I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then I gave him Vardaman to replace the
child I had robbed him of. And now he has three children that are his and not mine. And then
I could get ready to die.
One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin,
wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them
salvation is just words too.