Faulkner's As I Lay Dying does not
rank high on the social issues pecking order, but here are a
few:
Lack of education: Sex
education is non-existent; Dewey Dell doesn't know how she got pregnant. Anse puts
Cash's leg in a cement cast. Addie beats her students. Peabody is an obese doctor who
has to be pulled up the hill. The family carts around a decaying body for eight days.
Needless to say, the Deep South needs education
reform.
Mental illness:
Vardaman does not understand death and thinks his mother is a fish. Darl is committed
to a mental hospital mainly because of his actions (barn burning), not based on a
thorough psychiatric exam. So, no one knows who's crazy or sane. It's all based on
social expectation, which--in an illegitimate society--is a recipe for disaster.
They're all probably nuts. Or, in that society, they're all sane. As Cash
says:
Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy
and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it
aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at
him when he does
it.
Social
Class: the Bundrens are dirt poor and lazy. Even their backwoods
neighbors thumb their noses at them. The Bundrens' idea of high society is Jefferson,
where they get false teeth, a train, and a back-alley abortion. They make the Beverly
Hillbillies look sophisticated.
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