How Addie's chapter changes the narrative

In any form of entertainment, there are people who stand out with their ability to stay relevant even through the dynamic interests of their audience. Ryan Higa, a popular YouTuber, has been creating videos for over 10 years now, but still has millions of views on his most recent videos. Addie seems to have achieved a similar feat in As I Lay Dying. Despite the fact that she dies relatively early after the beginning of the novel, she narrates her own chapter once the trip to Jackson is well under way. So how, or why, is Addie’s point of view still pertinent when she’s dead?

There is obviously a reason why Faulkner included multiple narrative points of view – if they contributed nothing to the story, it would only be useless and confusing to have them. The purposes, as I see them, are to give us various points of view on the same person (as we saw through the class activity about Anse) as well as a sense of each character’s unique qualities based on how they narrate (e.g. we learn that Cash is diligent but not all-too-interested in narrating to us, and that Vardaman is truly trying to make sense of what’s going on with Addie’s death and all). Readers can expect, then, that reading a chapter narrated by Addie herself will give us some insight into her feelings about her own life and death, about the journey to Jackson with her body, about the other characters, etc.

What we see in Addie’s chapter reflects these things and more. She starts off by telling readers “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” (169). Well… Addie is not the most sympathetic person, it seems. This apathetic and somewhat contemptuous attitude continues throughout the chapter. Near the end, Addie says, “And now he has three children that are his and not mine. And then I could get ready to die” (176). This sentiment reflects a notion Addie learned from her father, that “the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time” (169). Addie apparently thinks herself ready to die after having corrected the situation with her illegitimate child. Around the middle of the chapter, Addie discusses the word “love” and how she doesn’t see a place for it, but doesn’t really care if Anse uses it. Also, Addie says that she’ll get Anse to take her to Jackson when she’s dead as a form of revenge.

By making Addie seem wholly unconcerned about her life once all her mistakes had been corrected, I think Faulkner is trying to make the reader less likely to pity Addie during the journey to Jackson. If Addie had portrayed herself as someone who loved life, loved those close to her, and whose only dying wish was to be buried in Jackson, As I Lay Dying would have been a very different story. Addie’s corpse is terribly abused in the course of the journey, and if Addie had cared about her memory being honored, then the journey would be an abysmal failure and really quite hard to stomach. However, since Addie seems not to have cared too much about anything, we as readers can see the journey less like something which was truly important to Addie and more like something which she requested just for the hell of it; rather than feeling bad that Addie’s corpse is constantly being treated irreverently, we can focus on the journey itself and the characters who are still alive.