The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Eula is one of the two daughters of Cora and Vernon Tull. Apparently while the Tulls were in town she bought a "bead" necklace for "twenty-five cents," perhaps to appeal to Darl Bundren, whom she watches as he passes through the Bundren house (9). Either she or her sister is the daughter Whitfield refers to at Addie's funeral as "Tull's youngest" (179).

Kate is one of Vernon and Cora Tull's two daughters. The way she appears in her parents' narrative sections suggests that she is clear-eyed if not angry and cynical about the place that she occupies as a poor woman. She calls out the woman who changed her mind about buying her mother's cakes as one of "those rich town ladies" (7) and even gets ahead of the plot of the novel when she predicts that Anse will "get another [wife] before cotton-picking" (34). She may also be attracted to Jewel Bundren.

Dewey Dell is the fourth child and only daughter of Addie and Anse Bundren. Cora Tull calls her a "tom-boy girl" (8); several male characters comment on how "pretty" she is, "in a kind of sullen, awkward way" (199). Unknown to anyone but her brother Darl and Lafe, her sexual partner, she is pregnant and wants to go to Jefferson to get an abortion. She is able to communicate with Darl without words and she narrates four chapters in the novel.

This is the woman in As I Lay Dying who was going to have a party for which Cora made cakes; when she calls off the party, Cora is left holding the cakes. Cora's daughter Kate describes her, with some bitterness, as one of "those rich town ladies [who] can change their minds," though we have no direct evidence about her social status (7).

Miss Lawington is the lady in Jefferson who tells Cora about another lady who needs cakes for a party. The fact that the Tulls put "Miss" in front of her name suggests her higher class status (7).

The Tulls are the Bundrens' closest neighbors. According to Darl, Cora was once a school teacher like Addie Bundren. In the narrative she is a frugal and conscientious woman who is fond of singing hymns inside and outside of church. She attends Addie at her deathbed, and in her commentary on the various members of the Bundren family often sees "God's bounteous love for His creatures" in very unlikely places (24).

A former school teacher who came to Frenchman's Bend from Jefferson, Addie is the matriarch of the Bundren family who is lying on her death bed when the narrative begins. Her wish to be buried in Jefferson initiates and drives the journey at the center of the novel. After she dies she narrates one section of the novel; it demonstrates her cruel and sometimes violent detachment from others and explains her preference for Jewel among her children. Cora Tull tells us that "not a woman in this section [of Yoknapatawpha] could ever bake with Addie Bundren" (8).

Cash is the first-born of Addie and Anse Bundren. He is a good carpenter, who shows his devotion to his mother through his handiwork. He narrates five chapters which become increasingly more developed, beginning with a list of the reasons he made his mothers coffin on the bevel and ending with the final chapter of the novel in which he conveys the denouement of the story in a straightforward, matter of fact way. He is compulsive about his tools, and his narration shows him to be single–minded as he tends to frame everything in the terms of his craft.

Vernon is the father of the Tull family, farmers and neighbors to the Bundrens. Most of what we know about Tull comes directly from the six sections that he narrates, for the other characters do not spend time describing him. But both his actions in the novel and Anse's habit of depending on him confirm his statements about how generous he has been as a neighbor. He also sounds like one of the novel's more reliable commentators, especially when he thinks that it might be a mistake for a person "to spend too much time thinking" (71).

Jewel is Addie's third - and favorite - child, illegitimately conceived with Reverend Whitfield. We know he is "a head taller than any of the rest" of the family (17), and the other narrators often reference his eyes to describe the intensity of his nature; they "look like pale wood in his high-blooded face" (17). While the Bundren family has always had mules, he worked hard to acquire a horse, which he rides with pride and skill. Throughout the narrative he is quietly, though violently, angry.