As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Published 1930 · 267 pages · 62,660 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is As I Lay Dying to read?
As I Lay Dying scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
- Rural Southern dialect rendered phonetically; vocabulary is simple but the voices are so distinct that parsing who speaks requires adjustment. "My mother is a fish" is a complete chapter.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Stream of consciousness varies by narrator. Darl's sections are lyrical and complex; Vardaman's are fragmented; others fall between. Faulkner reproduces thought patterns, not conventional prose.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Death, family obligation, and the grotesque are explored through a corpse's journey to burial. The abstraction is in what the novel refuses to explain about its characters' motivations.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- The plot is simple—transport a body—but the 59 chapters from 15 narrators fracture the telling. Information is scattered and must be assembled.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- Fifteen narrators including the dead Addie Bundren. No narrator has complete information. Darl may be clairvoyant or mad. The reader must triangulate truth from unreliable fragments.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The coffin, the river crossing, Jewel's horse, Vardaman's fish—symbols proliferate without authorial explanation. Each narrator assigns different meaning to the same objects.
- Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
- Faulkner maintains devastating irony about the Bundrens' "devotion" to Addie while showing their actual motives. The gap between what characters say and mean is vast.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The burial happens, but why characters act as they do remains opaque. Darl's fate is shown but not explained. The new Mrs. Bundren appears without preparation.
- Structural complexity: 82 out of 100
- Fifty-nine chapters from fifteen narrators, including a dead woman. Chapters range from one sentence to several pages. The structure itself is the novel's primary difficulty.
How As I Lay Dying is regarded
As I Lay Dying holds a literary regard score of 90 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.