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Addie, a schoolteacher, marries Anse Bundren, a tall man with a humped back who has a farm in the hills of Yoknapatawpha County. They have a child, Cash, who makes Addie feel less alone and whom she loves.
Her contentment with one child is shattered when she finds herself pregnant with her second child, Darl. She feels that Anse has tricked her with words of love, which she is sure he cannot feel. In revenge, she secures a promise she knows will be nearly impossible to keep. She makes Anse promise to bury her next to her relatives 40 miles away in Jefferson, the county seat, when she dies.
One summer, Addie has a brief, passionate affair with Whitfield, a preacher. They have a son, Jewel, whom Anse raises as his own. To make amends to Anse for her unfaithfulness, she has two other children, Dewey Dell and Vardaman.
When Vardaman is eight or nine, Addie lies dying on her corn-shuck mattress. Outside her window, Cash, now a 29-year-old carpenter, carefully fashions her coffin as a gesture of love. While the Tulls--neighbors--are visiting, Darl convinces jewel to take a trip with him to pick up a load of lumber. Darl knows that Jewel is Addie\'s favorite child. The trip for lumber is a contrivance--Darl\'s way of keeping Jewel from his mother\'s bedside when she dies.
Their absence with the family\'s wagon presents a problem. In the July heat, dead bodies decompose rapidly. A wheel breaks, and before Darl and jewel can replace it, bring the wagon home, and load Addie\'s body onto it for the trip to Jefferson, three days have passed.
By this time, heavy rains have flooded the Yoknapatawpha River and washed out all the bridges that cross it. The Bundrens travel past the Tulls\' house to the Samsons\', then back to the Tulls\' again to ford the river at what had been a shallow place before the flood.
The river is vicious. The Bundrens\' mules drown. The wagon tips over, dumping Cash and breaking his leg. Jewel, on horseback, manages to keep the wagon and its load from drifting downstream.
They stop at the Amstids\' on the other side of the river. Anse trades Jewel\'s horse and Cash\'s eight dollars--he had been saving for a wind-up phonograph--for a new mule team.
To reach Jefferson, the Bundrens have to drive out of the county to Mottson. Addie\'s rotting body outrages the townspeople. The Bundrens buy a dime\'s worth of cement to make a cast for Cash\'s leg. Dewey Dell, who is pregnant, tries and fails to buy some abortion pills in the local drugstore.
They spend the night at the Gillespies\' farm. Darl sets fire to the barn where Addie\'s body is stored in an effort to spare his mother more degradation. However, Jewel saves her coffin with a heroic act. Dewey Dell, who hates Darl because he knows she is pregnant, realizes that Darl set the fire and tells the Gillespies.
The Bundrens reach Jefferson nine days after Addie\'s death. They dig her grave with borrowed shovels and then get on with their own lives. They commit Darl to the state insane asylum rather than pay the Gillespies for a new barn. A dishonest drugstore clerk takes advantage of Dewey Dell, who fails to get the abortion pills she wanted. Anse takes money from Dewey Dell, buys a set of false teeth, and marries a \"duck-shaped\" woman.
Faulkner provides you with two basic perspectives on the characters, allowing you to view them through their own interior monologues and through the eyes of others. You must sort through the different views to arrive at your own understanding of the Bundrens and their neighbors.
What follows is an exploration of the 15 characters whose interior monologues make up the novel. The seven Bundrens are presented first. The numbers after the characters\' names refer to the sections they narrate. Faulkner didn\'t number the sections. They are numbered here to help you match your copy of the novel with the section-by-section discussion in this guide. (See the Note on Numbering the Monologues at the beginning of The Story section.)
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