As I Lay Dying blends elements of tragedy and comedy. Tragically, the Bundren children are reared by their lazy and selfish father (Anse) and by their mother Addie. Addie loves only her son Jewel, who was not Anse’s child. When Addie dies, the young Vardaman must cope with his grief alone. Darl also suffers a mental breakdown as the family travels across the county to bury their mother’s decaying corpse. Most of the comic elements involve Anse. When Addie dies, for example, Anse declares, "God's will be done. Now I can get them teeth." Eventually, readers discover that Anse has engineered the grueling trip primarily as a way to get to town to acquire new teeth and a new wife.
I would say that As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is a tragicomedy; in fact, it contains both elements of comedy and tragedy and sometimes it's not very easy to distinguish between the two. We could also define the novel as black humor. Faulkner uses tragic irony and a very dark sense of humor, incorporating a variety of grotesque situations into the plot.
An example of a grotesque, morbid situation is, for example, when Cash's mother witnesses Cash building her coffin right outside her window! To the readers, this is ironic and humorous but also repellent and rather absurd.
A variety of situations throughout the novel are often portrayed as awkwardly funny, leaving the reader appalled and humored at the same time. The tragedy recounted in the novel is, in any case, absurd to the point of becoming funny. The absurdity and confusion present in the novel are made even stronger due to the fact that there are many narrators in the novel and therefore perspective shifts continuously, giving a sense of discontinuity and further insanity.
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