Faulkner's as I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying exhibits an almost inhuman reduction of character to the barest urges of desire and destination, reflecting a level of reality unique in Faulkner’s fiction. The prominence of Addie’s father’s flat insistence that our lives are no more than preparation for death, whatever the form our “readiness” may take, draws the novel into consideration of the hypothesis Freud raises in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “that ‘the aim of all life is death’ ” (Freud 1961a: 32). The death to which life drives, according to Freud and more than likely according to Addie’s father, is not the higher, heavenly existence of Christian belief, but an original inanimacy, a stasis beneath being from which we have been disturbed by external stimuli.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud revises the dualism he always insists on as the core of psychic life by replacing the conflict between ego instincts and sexual instincts with the conflict between life and death (Freud 1961a: 47): the forces of Eros and Thanatos. Eros is the instinct “towards change and development . . . towards progress and the production of new forms” (1961a: 30–1). It moves outward to an external object of love, to family, to community, aiming “to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus – in short, to bind together” (1969: 5). Ideally it is the “instinct toward perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation” (1961a: 36). Eros is countered by the drive to destruction, “to undo connections and so to destroy things” (1969: 5), ultimately to fulfill the basic human need to replace all psychic disturbance with former psychic calm by returning to “the quiescence of the inorganic world” (1961a: 56). As for “living,” it is nothing but the process of our return to inanimacy, what Freud calls the “detour,” “the circuitous path . . . to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts” that