Addie Bundren is dying, and her family drags her coffin across Mississippi to bury her where she wanted, through flood and fire, while she decomposes. Faulkner wrote this in six weeks, working the night shift at a power plant, and never changed a word. Fifteen narrators speak, including Addie herself, from beyond death. The prose ranges from the nearly incomprehensible to the heartbreakingly simple. My mother is a fish. The journey is grotesque and heroic and absurd, and Faulkner never tells us which. He called it a tour de force. For once, the boast was justified.