As I Lay Dying

Darl and Jewel watch their brother Cash make their mother Addie Bundren’s coffin. As Darl walks into the house, he can hear the persistent sound of the adze (an axe-like cutting tool) at work on the coffin.

Cora Tull, the Bundren’s neighbor, has made cakes to sell. Although the cakes have turned out well, the wealthy lady she was going to sell them to cancelled her party, and she doesn’t want them. Kate thinks the lady should have bought Cora’s cakes as a matter of principle. Outside the window, they can hear Cash making Addie’s coffin.

We learn that Addie is still in the process of dying. Cora states that her cakes could not compare to the quality of Addie’s. She and Kate even fantasize that Addie will recover enough to bake more cakes. They spot Darl coming in through the hallway.

This chapter presents the Bundren sons’ contrasting personalities. Darl has a habit of waiting until the others are asleep so that he can be at ease and do as he likes. When he was a boy, he would take nighttime sips of water from a gourd, and now that he is older, he raises his shirttail and engages in a form of non-contact masturbation, “feeling myself without touching myself, feeling the cool silence blowing upon my parts” (7).