William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" Online Quiz | Literature

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. Perhaps the most quoted line from this very famous novel is "My mother is a fish." Which character settles on this idea as a way of understanding mortality?

Answer: Vardaman

Vardaman is the youngest child who associates the death of a fish in time and his memory with the death of his mother. He comes to believe that his mother actually has to be a fish. Shortly after coming to this conclusion, he actually bores holes in his mother's coffin to allow her to breathe.

2. The title of this novel comes from Homer and the Greeks. Much like in Greek tragedy, in its own way, "As I Lay Dying" makes use of a kind of chorus. Which conventional woman character identifies herself rather tritely with the ordinary, the judgment of the people, the public norm?

Answer: Cora

Agamemnon says to Odysseus in Book XI of "The Odyssey": "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades."

Faulkner has written a lot about this novel which was written at breakneck speed while he was working at another job. He will call it a "tour de force" and criticize it because he knew the end of it before he began writing it. He thought, in contrast, that his novel "The Sound and the Fury," was better because it grew out of not knowing how it was to end.

3. One of the children finds a way to buy a horse. This horse becomes his devoted object of attention. Some critics argue that this son displaces his feelings for his mother onto this horse. Who is this quietly passionate character?

Answer: Jewel

Jewel and his half brother Darl have a seethingly passionate and antagonistic relationship.

4. What does the oldest child Cash make, even while his mother is dying?

Answer: Coffin

Faulkner divides his novel into fifty-nine sections. Nineteen of these sections are in the troubled, profound mind of Darl, the second oldest brother.
In Cash's section, the reader sees his meticulously accurate mind at work. His section is a numbered list, beginning "I made it on the bevel." His final line in this section is, interestingly, number 13, "It makes a neater job."
The first section, Darl's, refers to Cash sawing, to the "chuck" "of the adze."

5. The Bundren family undergo a series of encounters with the physical world as they make their troubled way to bury Addie. Which is not something they encounter on their journey to complete Anse's promise to bury his wife with her own family?

Answer: snow

Anse, in his unfortunate, complaining way, thinks during the journey, "It's a hard country on a man; it's hard." (110) Among other things, the family has experienced the fire of the barn (set by Darl) which housed Addie's coffin (Jewel saved the coffin, and Cash got his leg broken for the third time in the process), flooded-out bridges, and the temporary floating away of the coffin in the process.

6. Whose thinking occurs after his/her actual death?

Answer: Addie

Dewey Dell, Addie's daughter, is highly troubled because she is pregnant. In this comic-tragic novel, Dewey Dell tries to find a way to fix her "problem." A pharmacist deceives her along the way with one of his remedies, which is not the kind of remedy she wanted at all. The whole experience for seventeen year old Dewey Dell confirms her sense that she feel[s]"like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth" (66).
Addie's section after her death explains her affair and her thinking about the non-relation between words and action. She sees them as horizontal and vertical lines--never meeting.

7. Which brother is put away in an asylum for setting fire to a barn, for being unlike the neighbors, for being an overly philosophical misfit?

Answer: Darl

Finally, Darl's involvement in setting the fire is made public, in part because of the seething relations among the family and also because the barn owner is furious at the lost of his property. By the end, Cash, the judicious one, agrees that Darl, his brother, should go to Jackson, the institution, because what is right may just be what the majority of people think is right after all.

He, Cash, therefore will side with the majority who think that Darl needs to be put away.

8. Darl says, in his great psychological insomnia, "In a strange night you must empty yourself for [something]." What is that something?

Answer: sleep

To give you a flavor of what Darl is like, I quote a little from the Vintage Paperback edition of "As I Lay Dying": Darl, at approximately 28 years old, puts it this way, "In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not".

By the end of the novel, wildly laughing, he refers to himself in the third person.

9. When Addie, the mother, dies, her husband promises to bury her with her people. Once he completes his promise, he appears with a new Mrs. Bundren and something else he's been crying out for throughout the novel. His appearance is affected by the lack of good ones. What specifically does Anse get?

Answer: teeth

This piercing, tortured trip ends with Anse proudly emerging with two things: a new wife and teeth that the children said made him look about twelve inches taller. The new wife is hardly romantic, seen as a "duck-shaped woman" with "pop eyes."
In the beginning of the novel, Anse was all thumbs, awkward at the time of the death of his wife. His hands were said to be "claw-like." As the journey proceeds, little by little, Anse shows a streak of incredible meanness to his children, robbing them literally.

10. Which one of the Bundren children is a child of Addie's brief affair with the Reverend? This child, forever after, is not considered part of the family. He remains very silent, very physical and linked always to his horse. This man has a name which connotes his special value to his mother. Who is he?

Answer: Jewel

This family really does not understand each other well. Jewel struggled to be able to buy a horse. When he was gone working, the family incorrectly thought that Jewel might have been with a woman. When Jewel got the horse, he developed an amazing attachment to that horse.

Source: Author Windswept

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor Bruyere before going online.
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William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" Quiz

This 1930 novel deals with a family taking a long trip to bury their mother, Addie Bundren. The novel and this family devise in their grief a variety of unique ways to deal with their loss and express their intense feelings for each other. Discover the B

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