Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is an unconventional and on some level disturbing novel. For me, at least, every time I finished a reading I found myself in a really strange mood, and although I’m glad I did read it (eventually. RIP my quiz grades), I’m not so sure I’ll be reaching for this book as casual reading in the future. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this general sense of weirdness (beyond the fact that the plot centers on a dysfunctional family carting around their mother’s decomposing corpse) but I think one of the most disorienting parts of this book is the way it approaches heroism.

Anse, as himself, doesn’t seem like a hero: his defining trait is indecisiveness and the inability to do literally anything. His philosophy is that, because humans were built upright, God “aimed for them to stay put like a tree or a stand of corn.” Although he claims to always provide for his family, his survival is mostly thanks to everyone around him constantly bailing him out. Even his physical appearance is dreary and hopeless, always hunched and unsure of himself, and with a face sunken by his missing set of teeth. The setting, too, is mundane: they ride a rickety cart through the dusty, sparsely populated Yoknapatawpha County. The trip is a fiasco, and by the end, every Bundren but Anse has lost some defining element of their character: Cash can no longer be a good carpenter, Darl is in an asylum, Jewel lost his horse, Dewey Dell is trapped by an unwanted pregnancy and Vardaman is probably traumatized.

From a purely structural point of view, though, many of the elements of a hero’s journey fit into place. The way the novel begins is very similar to Campbell’s paradigm of a hero’s journey. The family is motivated to go to Jefferson by Addie’s dying wish to be buried with her family, which could be Campbell’s “Call to Adventure.” They have the choice to refuse the quest -- burying Addie at home would be much easier and safer than going to Jefferson -- but don’t, and when they eventually start off towards Jefferson, Anse’s narration makes it clear that what might be a simple road trip for someone else is for him “Entering the Unknown.” The “Supernatural Aid” is a little less obvious, but every Bundren seems to have their own talisman they carry with them to Jefferson, and also some quality that seems to be just slightly beyond the domain of an ordinary person. Cash, for instance, has his toolbox and unbreakable stoicism; Jewel has the horse that only he can ride. The “Supreme Ordeal” would of course be burying Addie, and for Anse, his reward is a new wife and the long-awaited set of teeth.

And the more you think about it, the more it seems like if we were given this novel in another light, the same traits that initially seemed fundamentally un-heroic could fit into this paradigm as well. If the hero is someone who doesn’t fit into the ordinary world, someone with a quality that sets them apart from everyone else, Anse could definitely fit the mold: perhaps his mysterious sweat allergy is actually a supernatural asset, and maybe his aversion to travel is what makes this long journey so heroic for him in the first place. Maybe the people who always had to help him out were no different than the helpers and gods Odysseus encountered; maybe the traumatized Bundren family doesn’t deserve our sympathy any more than Odysseus’s doomed crew did. And good old Yoknapatawpha county, too, needs only a little embellishment to paint it as a great land as mysterious as Ithaca, ruled by uncontrollable floods, capital-G God, and noble, unbreakable family vows.

This ambiguity is compounded by how the novel’s multiple narrators and their varying degrees of reliability force the reader to be constantly aware of how subjective any view of the situation really is. Some of the chapters are so abstract that it’s genuinely difficult to be sure of fairly concrete plot elements, and the one person who does seem to be a reliable narrator, Darl, is recounting events that he couldn’t logically have seen, and ends the novel laughing uncontrollably on the way to a mental institution. It makes the question of heroism much more complicated because the elements that make a hero do seem to be in the novel, but it’s hard to interpret what they all mean when you can’t tell if an idea is the truth or a narrator's opinion.