Morbid

This was one of the most morbid books I have ever read. It's not because it was about death; it's how the Bundrens dealt with Addie and her body both before and after she died. I thought making the coffin in front of her was bad enough, but the level of morbidness kept getting worse and worse. I don't know if it was the holes bored into her face, the fact that she fell into a river, was then carted around towns for over a week with an unbearable stench, then burned in the barn, and then replaced within days of her death that finally got to me, or if it was just a combination of the whole outrageous situation. I have to wonder why Faulkner would have put a corpse through this much trouble. What point was he trying to make here? As bad as it sounds, I think her corpse was necessary for the characters to develop as they did. It caused Darl to go insane and Anse to lose his soul. The characters obviously had these tendencies in them, but was Addie's body necessary for them to come out?