As I Lay Dying
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| Gene C. Fant Jr |
I am doing a blog series on Novels Every Christian Should Consider Reading.
Gene C. Fant Jr. (PhD, University of Southern Mississippi) serves as provost and professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida.
He is the author of The Liberal Arts: A Student’s Guide and God as Author: A Biblical Approach to Narrative.
Occasionally American literature students are assigned William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying. The choice is somewhat pragmatic, as Faulkner is one of the 20th Century’s great fiction writers but his masterwork, The Sound and the Fury, is incredibly difficult to read.
As I Lay Dying is brief and the plot is intriguing (a backwoods family’s preparations for the matriarch’s burial, stymied by a difficult journey to the family plot). One chapter is composed entirely of one sentence (“My mother is a fish”), which has led to many a perplexed and exasperated student. At least there is now a film adaptation directed by uber-cool James Franco.
For Christians, As I Lay Dying offers a bonanza of theological discovery, not in terms of devotional affirmation of orthodoxy but in terms of its sober reminders of the necessity of faith. Faulkner adored the Old Testament but was less enamored of the New, believing that the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures were more compelling. My sense is that he was a crypto-Calvinist who believed the atonement to be so limited (and God to be either so holy or so cruel) that no one is elect. God is a just Judge who rightly sentences everyone to death. Each of us, then, lives on a constant trajectory toward death; vultures circle each of our corpses, at least metaphorically.
I have heard it said that Western culture, American culture in particular, is enamored with the Gospel’s fruit even as it dismisses its roots in Christ’s sacrificial, grace-filled ministry that calls us to humble repentance. As I Lay Dying depicts a dreadful world that has neither the Gospel’s root nor its fruit.
The novel ponders the nature of manhood and femininity.
It confronts us with the desperation that accompanies abortion.
It provides us with an fictive incarnation of the Darwin Awards‘ most thick-skulled stupidity.
For those of us who become Christ-followers at a young age, there is a constant risk of forgetfulness about what life is like without the hope of the Gospel. We simply cannot remember what it feels like to live without hope, which is the state of our friends and neighbors apart from Christ. As I Lay Dying is a way to empathize afresh with this hopelessness. When we get to the closing pages, we are overcome: Oh! Would that the world did not have to be like this! Would that we were more than dying animals trapped in a dying world! Would that there were a Savior who could rescue us from our stupidity and mortality!
Ah, there is the lesson. Salvation comes from outside of this sphere. Until we humble our hearts and lift up our eyes, we cannot see what is transcendently present: Christ’s offer of grace.
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