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Addie Bundren

The traditional role of an American mother has always been to nurture and care for her husband and children, and to raise the latter with good, wholesome religious values.   A mother is supposed to love her children unconditionally and instill in them the same ideals of respect and love that she was brought up to know. But what if the mother was brought up unloved and unwanted, in a family in which she learned not how to love, but instead to view the world with a nihilistic eye?   Would not her own children be affected by her worldview? In As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner uses Addie Bundren’s perspective surrounding the birth of each of her five children to show why the Bundrens are unable to establish any real, loving relationships with each other. Addie’s egocentricity and fatalistic outlook influenced her children so much that her differing attitudes when each of them was born influenced their actions and mindsets throughout the book.
Addie grew up with a father who taught her that “the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time" (169). The nihilism that surrounded her as a child caused her to live her life with a sense of disillusionment with the world around her, barely valuing life at all. She believed she was neglected and alone in the world, and eventually married Anse Bundren for no other reason than because she thought that having a child might alleviate some of that loneliness. The violence of giving birth, she thought, could force both herself and the world around her to take notice of the simple fact that she was alive. Because she had been taught that life was preparation for death, she wanted to create something that would remain after she had inevitably fulfilled her reason for living by dying. And because of these beliefs, she had not one, but five children. Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman were all conceived and born at times when their mother was perceiving the world and her life differently, and they all grew up...