As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying was the first William Faulkner book I ever read. I was about 18, and while a lot of it went over my head (some of it still does, to be honest), there was something deeply intriguing and evocative about it. I was used to more popular literature, with clearly delineated stories and key plot points spelled out or at most lightly obscured. As I Lay Dying offers no such roadmap. The story, itself quite minimal, is buried under conflicting perspectives, stream of conscience narration, and a language both florid and deeply colloquial.

The central premise concerns Anse Bundren and his five children, who travel with the recently deceased Addie Bundren (Anse’s wife and the children’s mother) in order to fulfill her dying wish to be married in the town Jefferson. Sudden rainfall floods the river and washes out the bridges, making the journey a challenge, but the real conflict is between and within the family members themselves. Cas, the oldest, is stoic to the point of self-destruction, refusing to admit to any discomfort from his broken leg. Darl, the second child, is slowly going mad. Jewel, the middle child and product (we infer) of an affair, bucks at the contraints imposed by his headstrong father. Dewey Dell, the only daughter, is pregnant out of wedlock and desperately seeking an abortion. Vardaman, the youngest, struggles to process his mother’s death, likening her to a fish he caught shortly before she died.

Each chapter is in first person, told by a revolving cast of characters. Most often it’s the Bundrens themselves, but smaller characters are given narrator duty as well. The prose, as you might expect, is superb, and even where actions are unclear, the strength of the language pulls you along. Rereading this some near twenty years later, I’m still struck by its narrative force. It feels like a much bigger book than it is, not because it drags ,but because of the weight of psychological and literary detail Faulkner provides. An excellent book.

Mosquitoes - William Faulkner

Mosquitoes is the second novel that William Faulkner published, appearing only a year after his debut Soldiers’ Pay. Though it is uncertain which of them was written first, Mosquitoes certainly feels like the sophomore work, as its tone and style place it somewhere between the more straightforward Soldiers’ Pay and the mad rush of stream-of-conscious fervor to come. The story concerns a party hosted by a socialite named Mrs. Maurier, whose fascination with artists leads her to invite various luminaries from the New Orleans literary and artistic scene on a four-day cruise aboard a motorized yacht called the Nausikaa.

Faulkner employs many of the techniques that would become his signatures, including a rich and somewhat archaic diction, bursts of stream-of-conscious writing to underscore moments of great psychological insight or strain, and a tendency to write around key events rather than describing them outright, leaving it up to the reader to infer what happened based on the shape of the hole made by its absence. This technique even extends to the titular insects themselves, who plague the characters on multiple occasions but are never actually mentioned by name (note: this only occurred to me midway through my reading, so it’s possible I missed a mention early on. In any case, he seemed to take pains not to write the word “mosquito,” whatever the reason for that may be)

Another common trait in Faulkner’s work—at least the ones I’ve read—that also appears in Mosquitoes is his tendency to avoid having one character stand out as a clear protagonist. Reflecting on the story, there are a number of candidates for the title: Mrs. Maurier, whose desire to host a gathering for artists launches the entire novel; Mr. Talliaferro, whose presence bookends the novel; Fairchild, a slightly gone-to-pot novelist who seems a focal point for many of the other characters; Patricia, Mrs. Maurier’s niece, whose complex and combative relationship with her aunt and brother drive much of the story’s tension. However, none of these characters feel truly central to the story.

If the book has a key character, it is probably Gordon, the terse and enigmatic sculptor who acts as a source of fascination for many of the other characters, but hardly says or does anything himself. In this way, he is oddly reminiscent of the doomed pilot Donald Mahon in Soldiers’ Pay. While Gordon is a less sympathetic figure, both men cast outsized shadows across the stories they inhabit, where they act more as symbols and foils for the other characters than as characters themselves. It will be interesting to see if this tendency appears in Faulkners’ other books. Certainly the dead mother in As I Lay Dying is a good example of such, though it’s been too long since I read his other work to recall accurately.

Soldiers' Pay - William Faulkner

Soldiers’ Pay is the first novel that Faulkner published. It isn’t necessarily the first he wrote—there is uncertainty there—but it is unquestionably among his earliest novel-length works. His most famous novels—the Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August—would emerge in a flurry of astonishing literary fecundity a few years down the road. Soldiers’ Pay contains the seeds of these works, and if it is not quite at their level, it is nevertheless an impressive debut.

The story centers around Donald Mahon, a pilot in the First World War who was shot down and grievously wounded. While the story involves Mahon’s journey home and the reception he receives when he gets there, his character is less the nucleus of the novel than a hollow core around which the other characters orbit. Blind, weakened, and largely mute, he acts as a mirror, reflecting the wants and intentions of those around him.

The most prominent of these characters are Joe Gilligan and Margaret Powers, a solider-in-training who never saw combat and a war widow, who take Donald under their wing and shepherd him home. When her arrives, he is greeted with a mixture of joy and horror by his fiance, Cecily Saunders, who feels an obligation to marry him despite her disgust at his appearance, and is at once dismayed by this prospect and attracted by its romantic implications.

The prose is more straightforward than what might be thought as “Faulknerian,” as the more experimental aspects of his writing are used only sparingly. However, hints of the talent more fully unearthed in later works peek periodically through the topsoil. One lyrical passage struck me in particular: “an overcast sky, and earth dissolving monotonously into a gray mist, grayly. Occasional trees and houses marching through it; and towns like bubbles of ghostly sound beaded on a steel wire.”

Soldiers’ Pay is a novel of a developing author, but given who he developed into, it is still well worth reading.