Bundren House (Location Key)

In her section of As I Lay Dying Addie refers to the place where Anse is living when she meets him as "a new house" (171), which is one of the reasons, apparently, she decides to marry him. The house is located at the top of a steep bluff, across the road from their cotton field. Darl notes that because it "tilts a little down the hill . . . a breeze draws through the hall all the time, upslanting" (19). Darl and Cash sleep at least at times on "pallets" in this hall (11), which along with the breeze suggests the configuration of a dog-trot cabin (two rooms with an open roofed-over 'hall' or breeze-way between them), but since Darl refers to both the house's "front door" and "back door" (20), the Bundren place seems more substantial than that kind of cabin typically is. There's no indication of how many rooms the house contains, but to one side of the hall is the room in which Addie dies, and afterwards the rest of the family eat in the "kitchen" (59). The room's window looks out to the yard near the front of the house where Cash builds her coffin. The house has a back porch that looks out over the ridge toward the rest of the farm, but the barn is not visible from it (59). There is a path that runs from the yard down to the foot of the bluff and past a spring to where the other farm buildings are located.