William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a novel about how the conflicting agendas within a family tear it apart. Every member of the family is to a degree responsible for what goes wrong, but none more than Anse. Anse's laziness and selfishness are the underlying factors to every disaster in the book.

As the critic Andre Bleikasten agrees, "there is scarcely a character in Faulkner so loaded with faults and vices" (84).

At twenty-two Anse becomes sick from working in the sun after which he refuses to work claiming he will die if he ever breaks a sweat again. Anse becomes lazy, and turns Addie into a baby factory in order to have children to do all the work. Addie is inbittered by this, and is never the same. Anse is begrudging of everything. Even the cost of a doctor for his dying wife seems money better spent on false teeth to him. "I never sent for you" Anse says "I take you to witness I never sent for you" (37) he repeats trying to avoid a doctor's fee.......

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Title: As I Lay Dying
Approximate Word Count: 658
Approximate Pages: 3 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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