Addie Bundren from As I Lay Dying is a complicated character. For the entire first half of the book we only see her in a sympathetic way. She is sick and dying and her family is gathered around her caring for her and morning her when she’s gone. They even go on this insane and dangerous trip in order to bury her where she asked for it. The whole beginning of the book is focused on love and family but it turns out to be a lie. When we finally get to Addie’s chapter in the book, we find out that she is a teacher who hates her job and would even go as far as to beat the children. But even with knowing that fact, Addie can be seen as sympathetic. She is forced into a teaching job because she is a single woman and that's basically her only option. Then she is forced into a marriage with Anse, who is not the best husband, and forced to have his kids, even though she doesn’t want to. She has feelings that were not socially acceptable for that time period and there’s nothing she can do about it.
Addie gets her revenge by having Anse journey to bury her with a family that she doesn’t even care about. She sees her death as the ultimate divorce. They are eternally separated by being buried in different towns. This is where we can start to see the reference in the title come into play. In book 11 of The Odyssey, Agamemnon tells Odysseus that “As I lay dying, that woman with the dog's eye would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.” He’s talking about his wife Clytemnestra who betrayed him and cheated on him. Anse can be seen as the same as Agamemnon: his wife cheated on him and didn’t care about him, and they ended up being separated by death. Also, throughout her chapter, Addie refers to Anse as dead. But you can also see Addie as a sort of Agamemnon. While she is married to Anse, she is not dead physically, but in her soul, because of being forced into this relationship she didn’t want and that ended up violating her.
