"My Mother Is a Fish": All-Encompassing Inadequacy in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

Abstract

Novels tend to get their effects from plenitude, from excess and richness. What, then, to make of Faulkner‘s famous one-sentence chapter? Suspended in the middle of his As I Lay Dying is Vardaman‘s famous and opaque statement: “My mother is a fish.” Taylor Lemaire takes this weirdness head on, working with the chapter‘s impoverishment as a key to its function, paying attention even to its appearance on the page, arguing that “the line floats singularly within the vast, white void that surrounds it.” The line‘s richness lies in how it relates to another famous phrase from the novel, Addie Bundren‘s assertion that words are merely a “shape to fill a lack” – Addie‘s comment itself being another assertion/demonstration of impoverishment and displacement.

—Dr. Leonard Diepeveen