As I Lay Dying William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a novel about how the conflicting agendas within a family tear it apart. Every member of the family is to a degree responsible for what goes wrong, but none more than Anse. Anse's laziness and selfishness are the underlying factors to every disaster in the book. As the critic Andre Bleikasten agrees, "there is scarcely a character in Faulkner so loaded with faults and vices" (84). At twenty-two Anse becomes sick from working in the sun after which he refuses to work claiming he will die if he ever breaks a sweat again. Anse becomes lazy, and turns Addie in