For a novel about a journey, As I Lay Dying is surprisingly preoccupied with stasis. Despite the range of descriptive techniques that Faulkner employs throughout the narrative, many passages become obsessive reflections on the stillness and immobility of the landscape, of human kind, the permanence of action. Time seems to be stuck, and the action of the novel is operating in a landscape that has been paused.
Peabody offers the most succinct summary of the novels theme of stasis. He says:
“That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image. (45)”
This almost paradoxical understanding of the southern landscape as an ominous, brooding, static power stands in contrast to the pervasive sense of the landscape as fate, shaping the action and destinies of the family. In this way, Faulkner frames setting as monumental and godlike. Following our discussion of the conclusion on The Sound and the Fury , where Faulkner used a racially problematic symbol of Dilsey to express the persevering concept of monumental time, As I Lay Dying shifts this symbol to the landscape, which bears down ominously on the Bundrens.
Even in the scenes of action, a sense of stillness lends tension and dread. Darl narrates in the scene of the river crossing that:
“Pa and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice. (146)”
Darl’s quotation shows how the theme of stasis, which is certainly evocative of Faulkner’s ambiguous relationship towards the South, is also a structural strategy of suspense and tension. Just as the looming storm hovers over the narrative as a suspenseful possibility, the landscape that the characters move through hovers as a space of dread where time is both essential and nonexistent.
