In the novel As I Lay Dying, Tull says something in his interior monologue that is telling about the entire book: "If it takes wet boards for folks to fall, it's fixing to be lots of falling before this spell is done" (85). Though speaking specifically about the fall that has left Cash with a broken leg, the statement says a great deal about the ordeal the Bundren family withstands in As I Lay Dying. Cash has fallen on wet wood. The rest of the Bundren family will experience flood and fire before they finally bury Addie, and the though they survive in the story, Faulkner's use of wood imagery predicts their ultimate destruction. Wood is used to symbolize rigid stubbornness, death, and the fall of the South. The Bundrens are rigid in that they are hard, unbending people who stick to their principles, no matter how absurd or impractical. Death in the novel is not only the physical death of the matriarch, but also the spiritual death of those who retain their foolish pride. This pride and spiritual death reflect the fall of the Bundren family's standing in the community and anticipates the fall of the South as they know it in general. In their selfishness, which is an aspect of pride, they "honor" Addie's wish to be buried in Jefferson, not because they desire to grant her last request, but for their own purposes. The first chapter of the novel ends with the sound of wood being shaped into a container of death (5). This sound and this image set not only the tone of the novel, but also discloses one of its themes--that the whole Bundren family is dead.

In his essay "Mourning And Melancholia," Sigmund Freud makes an important distinction between grief and melancholy. He writes that grief is a reaction to the loss of a loved one, whereas melancholy concerns the loss of a loved object. "In grief, the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself [which becomes poor and empty]" (127). In this light, Anse is a character who is among the living dead because he has grief and melancholy mixed up. Instead of grieving over his dead wife, he is depressed because of his loss of her as an object. She has no value to him other than as someone to clean his home and bear his children. It is likely that the new wife he acquires at the end of the novel will be valued the same.

Anse is the only character other than Jewel who is described as wooden. Darl thinks of him: "He had that wooden look on his face again; that bold, surely, high-colored rigid look like his face and eyes were two colors of wood, the wrong one pale and the wrong one dark" (173). Darl, the mad poet, says that both the colors of Anse's face are wrong. He (Darl) sees that nothing Anse does is right, but that his father will stick fast to what he has set out to do. Anse is also described as having been carved by a "drunk caricaturist" (156). Early in the novel, Anse's "eyes look like pieces of burnt-out cinder fixed in his face, looking out over the land" (30-31). His face is resolute, absurd, and destructive.

In his book, William Faulkner: An Interpretation, Irving Malin writes: "Faulkner believes that the individual often refuses to come to terms with the disorder of our contempory world; that he tries to flee by adopting an inflexible pattern of behavior which offers solace in certainty of response" (1). Anse is this sort of character. He refuses to change his view of the universe, even to grieve over his dead wife. Malin continues:

Anse's rigid belief that a woman is an object is reflected in the woodenness of his features and like "burnt-out cinder," he is essentially useless. Futhermore, since Anse sees Addie's live body as a mere object for his use, one should not be surprised that he uses her dead body in order to procure new teeth and another wife.

His attitude could be seen as a Freudian case study. Again in "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud writes: "the patient represents his ego as worthless, incapable of any effort, and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself, and expects to be cast out and chastised" (127). He continues: "Shame before others, which would characterize this condition above everything, is lacking in him, or at least there is little sign of it" (129). Anse continually degrades himself. However, he is too stubborn to even feel shame or remorse for his actions, though they harm his entire family in the form of ridicule and physical suffering. He disguises his own ends as a "duty" to Addie and turns her burial into a farce, and yet is unable to feel true regret. Thus, Anse is spiritually dead. Dewey Dell says of him: "He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it no longer alive and dont yet know that it is dead" (58).

Anse believes that God has made men to stay in one place: "When He aims for something to me always a-moving, He makes it longways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man" (34-35). Here, Anse identifies himself with trees, objects fixed in one spot, going nowhere. This idea is a factor in the revelation of his deadness. Commenting on this passage, Fred Miller Robinson writes in The Comedy of Language:

Jewel is often described as "wooden," "wooden-faced," or "wooden-backed." He has worked hard for his horse and is stubbornly proud of his accomplishment. Anse is angry, not because Jewel has neglected his own chores to work for Snopes and earn the horse, but because of the possibility that he (Anse) will have to bear the cost of feeding it. Jewel may have been short-sighted, but not selfish in the way that Anse is. Jewel can at least be proud that he has worked for his horse, while Anse tells people "that if he ever sweats, he will die" (17).

Sitting decisively on the horse, Jewel is like a monument. Darl describes him: "He sits lightly, poised, upright, wooden-faced in the saddle, the broken hat raked at a swaggering angle" (102). In the first chapter, Darl also says: "Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the flood in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian" (4). Later, Dewey Dell thinks: "Jewel sits on his horse like they were both made out of wood, looking straight ahead" (116). Jewel resembles a memorial honoring a Civil War veteran, and takes the posture of an icon that represents a fading grandeur. However, he is not a statue that is made out of bronze, which could weather any storm. Fire and flood, the disasters of As I Lay Dying, will burn him and cause him to rot. He is like the whole Bundren family in this regard. Except for Cash, none have the mettle it takes to survive in the changing South. The total destruction of the Bundrens does not occur in the novel, but it is prefigured in Jewel. Like a wooden monument, the Bundren's can only retain their noble ideals for so long before they burn and rot in the wake of their selfishness.

To further the theme of relying on a faulty idol, Addie tells Cora that Jewel "will save me from the water and the fire" (160). Here, in an allusion to Isaiah 43:2, Addie gives Jewel the characteristics of a god, with the ability to protect and save. Certainly, he does help to pull her from the river and the burning barn, but it is her dead body he saves, and it is clear that her body is not as important as its burial to the family. In addition, Jewel does not have the power to save her body from death, only her dead body from further destruction and desecration.

Perhaps Jewel's portrayal as a rotting monument symbolizes the decay of the South. His inability to adapt to change will disable him in the future and keep him from living in the automated South to come. No matter how hard he works, he will always have to give up his horse in the end for an absurd cause. The cause is absurd because Anse, who causes most of the suffering and gets his way at the family's expense, is absurd. Robertson writes, "One is ready to agree with Peabody that the cure for the whole family would be to stick Anse's head in a saw" (83). As the cutting of deadwood heals a tree, so perhaps would Anse's decapitation bring new life to the Bundren family.

In Addie's section, she says that she "waited for him [Anse] in the woods, waiting for him before he saw me, I would think of him dressed in sin" (166). After the point when she considers Anse dead, she says, "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" (167). These two passages reveal a great deal about the twisted form of Calvanism she has been raised with and how her rejection of it has led her to equate the woods with sin.

Unlike Jewel, whose glory is always that he comes out of the woods, Addie revels in being in the woods, which she equates with sin. It is in the woods that Addie loses her virginity and there that she describes, in poetic language, a belief that makes God not a pure being who abhors sin, but a flawed being who has created and delights in it:

The woods could be contrasted then with the Garden of Eden. Addie's first understanding of sex is that it is merely a "duty to the alive," in other words for the continuance of the species. But Addie is a passionate woman, and perhaps her enjoyment of the sexual act conflicts with the warped notion that sex is not beautiful, but an ugly necessity, making pleasure a sin. However, the duty can no longer be "to the alive" because Anse is dead to her. "So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn't matter" (164). She chooses to treat the act as a mechanical process with Anse. Anse is like "an empty doorframe" (Slaughter 22) which is useless without a door. As Slaughter writes, "when Addie thinks of the person Anse, she recalls a blank" (21). Ironically, she expresses her passion with the man who represents the Calvanistic view of sex, the minister Whitfield.

Another non-moving object in the novel is the beam from which the spiders (which represent Addie's pupils) dangle (164). Slaughter writes,

Words are as dead to Addie as Anse is. Their purpose seems to be to separate objects, to keep people from making the contact that would stir them into action.

Michiko Yoshida writes,

Addies has thought a great deal about death and wrestled with her father's notion that "the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time" (161). In addition, she has watched her decaying family framed in the window and the doorway, as one looks at a picture. As Addie lays dying, she contemplates the dead.

Wood is very important to Vardaman's understanding of Addie's death. He says that he and Darl "can hear her [Addie] inside the wood" (204), and he tells Darl "`She's looking at me through the wood'" (205). Also, when Darl replies "Yes" to the latter statement, Vardaman asks "`How can she see through the wood, Darl?'" (205). That she is under an apple tree might again be an allusion by Faulkner to the Garden of Eden, because here is the place where she converses with God.

Here Addie is in the place of sin (the woods; the apple tree) but does not want to hide from God as Adam did in the third chapter of Genesis, but from man. According to Darl, she does not want to be away from sin, but from the instruments of sin.

Vardaman's conversation with Darl indicates, as Eric J. Sundquist writes in his essay "Death, Grief, Analogous Form: As I Lay Dying" that "Addie's death is not complete until the book ends" (170). At least for the child Vardaman and the perhaps childlike Darl, Addie posesses the characteristics of a live person who has the ability to see and to speak. Sundquist writes that "Vardaman asks the most difficult and sophisticated questions about death in the book. He asks where Addie has gone: he in effect questions the farcical funeral journey" (169).

He does not understand that Addie's death means she needs no air. As Olga W. Vickery writes, "Drilling holes in the coffin thus becomes a reasonable and humane act, an expression of concern for his mother" (62). Vardaman's attempt to help Addie breathe by drilling holes into the container of death is almost as quixotic as Darl's attempt to rescue his mother from further indignity by burning Gillespie's barn. Both Vardaman and Darl feel that their actions are heroic, but they are childish in that they have tried to solve complex problems with simple and comic solutions.

Judith Bryant Wittenburg, in her book Faulkner: The Transfiguration of Biography, notes that "Cash occupies the moral center of the novel" (108). Wittenburg sees Cash as a possible Christ figure in that Cash is a master carpenter (108) and that he is eventually "immobilized as if nailed to a cross" (111) when he is forced to ride on top of the stinking coffin after he has broken his leg for the second time.

Even if Cash is not a deliberate Christ figure, he must be seen as the hero of As I Lay Dying. He certainly is the character that Faulkner himself would have identified with. Wittenberg writes that there are a number of similarities between Cash and his creator, primarily in that during the time the novel was written, Faulkner was involved in several "woodworking projects" and called himself a "word-carpenter" (106). Wittenburg writes, "Cash Bundren thus has psychological importance as a self-portrait of his Creator; he represents both actually and metaphorically Faulkner's growing awareness of his own artistic and human possiblitiies" (110).

Cash is the novel's hero because he is not rigid, but determined to do a good job. He works with the wood; he is not "wooden." While the other characters, in their stubbornness, cause their own destruction, Cash endures because he has the ability to adapt. He is able to work with a broken leg. He faces the death of his mother with calm resignation, yet is determined to honor her by making a the best coffin possible. Though he is loved by his mother less than Jewel and despite the attitude of the other family members toward his determination, Cash is a steady worker who holds no grudge. Cash is the one who will bury the dead and endure. He will bury not only the truly dead (his mother), but he will bury the living dead in that the Cash's of the South will endure and prevail over people like the remaining Bundrens.

Works Cited