As I Lay Dying: Sections 1–12

by William Faulkner
This novel uses multiple narrators and perspectives to tell the story of a family's quest to honor a relative's last wishes.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Sections 1–12, Sections 13–28, Sections 29–45, Sections 46–59

Here are links to our lists for other works by William Faulkner: A Rose for Emily, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. undulation
    a wavelike curve
    Between the shadow spaces they are yellow as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks of the adze blade: a good carpenter, Cash is.
  2. salvation
    the state of being saved or preserved from harm
    But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her.
  3. ministration
    assistance in time of difficulty
    Maybe it will reveal her blindness to her, laying there at the mercy and the ministration of four men and a tom-boy girl.
  4. orifice
    an opening, especially one that opens into a bodily cavity
    It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank.
  5. beholden
    under a moral obligation to someone
    "We would be beholden to no man,” he says, “me and her."
  6. coddle
    treat with excessive indulgence
    Not that Jewel, the one she labored so to bear and coddled and petted so and him flinging into tantrums or sulking spells, inventing devilment to devil her until I would have frailed him time and time.
  7. partiality
    an inclination to favor one group or view over alternatives
    Nobody that knows Anse could have expected different, but to think of that boy, that Jewel, selling all those years of self-denial and down-right partiality — they couldn’t fool me: Mr Tull says Mrs Bundren liked Jewel the least of all, but I knew better.
  8. consciousness
    the state of having knowledge of
    So that when I lay me down in the consciousness of my duty and reward I will be surrounded by loving faces, carrying the farewell kiss of each of my loved ones into my reward.
  9. assail
    attack someone physically or emotionally
    Sometimes I lose faith in human nature for a time; I am assailed by doubt.
  10. bounteous
    given or giving freely
    But always the Lord restores my faith and reveals to me His bounteous love for His creatures.
  11. victuals
    any substance that can be used as food
    And now I got to pay for it, me without a tooth in my head, hoping to get ahead enough so I could get my mouth fixed where I could eat God’s own victuals as a man should, and her hale and well as ere a woman in the land until that day.
  12. nihilist
    someone who rejects all theories of morality
    The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
  13. irremediable
    impossible to correct or redress
    She looks at pa; all her failing life appears to drain into her eyes, urgent, irremediable.
  14. juxtaposition
    a side-by-side arrangement
    He drags a second plank into position and slants the two of them into their final juxtaposition, gesturing toward the ones yet on the ground, shaping with his empty hand in pantomime the finished box.
  15. approbation
    official acceptance or agreement
    For a while still she looks down at him from the composite picture, neither with censure nor approbation.
Created on Wed Aug 14 13:14:22 EDT 2013 (updated Thu Jul 03 18:38:37 EDT 2025)

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