Call to the Coffin
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner has to have one of the most unlikable casts I have ever read in a book. However, my only exception is Cash (and Dewey Dell, but she's not the main point of this blog post). While Cash may not verbally communicate as much as the rest of his family or neighbors, he often jumps into action and gets things done, one of which is making the coffin for Addie. Throughout the novel, we get a recurring auditory image of Cash sawing and hammering away at the coffin, building it plank by plank. At first, this seems like a sensible background image for a story about someone’s death. But that’s precisely the point; it’s in the background because of what it symbolizes: Addie’s death. In this blog post, I aim to analyze the significance of Cash’s sawing and how it relates to the hero’s journey in this novel. In the beginning, Cash’s character is immediately connected to the coffin. One of the first scenes is of him building the coffin. As Darl passes by Cash, he...