Ruminating on the religious themes in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Gene Fant finds the southern novelist “a very peculiar kind of Calvinist”:
He believed in total depravity and his novels explore original sin in all of its amazing variety. Unfortunately, he also seems to have believed that the atonement was limited, but so much so that no one was able to access it. My sense is that for him, God was a cruel judge who set up the rules, rigged the universe to punish fallen humankind, and then left us with a taunting glimmer of redemption, a risen Savior who has elected no one. It’s an amazing perversion of the Doctrine of Election to imagine an entire world that has realized that it has not been chosen to receive grace. If Faulkner is the creator god of his literary world, then certainly he himself is a cruel deity. …
Because there is no transcendent salvation possible, the best we can hope for is dignified endurance of suffering. Addie [Bundren] views her suffering as a sort of moral accounting of her sins. Faulkner himself noted that Dilsey, one of the primary narrators of The Sound and the Fury, was an ideal because she and her family “endured.” Suffering may not be redemptive, but it is character proving. Of course, proven character is a thin substitute for eternal redemption.
The Dish 