Addie Bundren is the dying matriarch of a poor, rural Mississippi family. Addie resents becoming a mother, feeling that her children try her patience and disturb her sense that she is alone in the world. Addie’s existential dread and inability to bond with her children is conveyed in her feeling that their names are words which have no significance for her.

Addie has an affair with the Reverend Whitfield leads to the conception of Jewel, the third child, who becomes Addie’s most favorite son. The deceit that Addie performs to coddle Jewel, mirrors that of her extramarital affair. Addie considers Jewel her penance, in addition to Dewey Dell and Vardaman, the children she later conceived with Anse, to “replace the child I had robbed him of” (107).

In her bridal gown and accompanied by all her children, a dead Addie makes the symbolic return journey to her town of origin and to the father who told her that living was just preparation for staying dead a long time. Addie has thus completed her womanly duties to Anse and is ready to go back to what she considers to be the eternal wisdom of her father. As Addie is dead through most of the novel, Faulkner uses Addie’s stinking corpse and poorly built coffin as a sort of punchline in several eras.