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As I Lay Dying takes place in or just outside Yoknapatawpha County, the \"apocryphal kingdom\" in northern Mississippi where 15 of Faulkner\'s 19 novels are set. Faulkner never disguised the fact that he modeled Yoknapatawpha after his own Lafayette County, where he lived for most of his life. Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha\'s county seat, is much like Oxford, Faulkner\'s hometown.
Yoknapatawpha is sparsely populated. Faulkner once put its population at 15,611, and its land area at 2400 square miles. The Bundrens\' closest neighbors in the pine hills, the Tulls, live four miles away. One of the themes of As I Lay Dying is isolation-the isolation even of people who are united in a common effort. The distance between the farms in Yoknapatawpha\'s hill country advances that theme. The Tulls, Samsons, Armstids, and Bundrens are all part of the same community, yet each family operates within its own orbit, and within that orbit each individual lives locked in the \"cell\" of his own consciousness.
The Bundrens\' journey to Jefferson takes them from the world of farmers and woodsmen to the world of storekeepers, mechanics, doctors and lawyers. The worlds are as different as day and night. Indeed, Faulkner suggests that the Yoknapatawpha River is a dividing line as significant to the Bundrens as the mythological River Styx was to the ancient Greeks. The River Styx, in Greek mythology, separated the world of the living from the world of the dead. Conflict between town and country folk is a motif that crops up throughout the novel.
Finding obstacles to put in the Bundrens\' path wasn\'t difficult. \"I simply imagined a group of people and subjected them to the simple universal natural catastrophes, which are flood and fire,\" Faulkner said in 1956. Rain and flood dominate the first two thirds of the book, adding to the Bundrens\' stress and enabling Faulkner to study their response to crisis.
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