William Faulkner spends much of the first fifty-two pages of his As I Lay Dying foreshadowing the death of Addie Bundren. There is no description of Addie gradually becoming ill here. Faulkner begins the work with an Addie who is already sick and very near death while elements of both the natural world and the doings of the Bundren family function as a sort of clock ticking down the moments until she passes. Cash’s saw, Dewey Dell’s fan, the buzzards, and the approaching storm all add this foreboding and looming sense of imminency to Addie’s death and the difficulties faced by the Bundrens in an attempt to bury her.
    In the beginning of the novel, the voice of Cash is nowhere to be heard, but the noises of the “snore” of his saw and the “chuck” of his axe are constantly present as he constructs Addie’s casket right outside of her window. The monotonous and repetitious sound of the casket being put together fills the air with an audible reminder of Addie’s coming death for the Bundrens and for Addie herself. Jewel, unhappy with the proximity to the window and believing it to be creating a spectacle of her death, notes the persistence of the noise. He says that Cash is sawing and hammering “until a man cant sleep even” (15). These noises create an ever present and unpleasant audible atmosphere of gloom that suffocates the boundaries of the Bundren household. “I could hear Cash sawing a mile before I got there” says Peabody as he gives a range to the noise and reinforces the strength of this auditory manifestation of dread and anxiety (42). Dewey Dell’s fan serves a similar purpose. Just like the almost mechanized workings of Cash, Dewey Dell ceaselessly fans her dying mother. Cora notes that she “swaps the fan to the other hand without stopping it” (9). The routine nature of the carpentry tools and the fan not only add to this sense of an almost tangible gloom, but also are almost time-telling agents. Each gust of air and the approaching completion of the coffin serve as physical reminders that the regular passage of time is still occurring; every fan and every cut essentially count down Addie’s last moments.
    The weather in this opening section is also a foreboding presence. Almost all of the narrators comment on the ominous clouds and the difficulties they present to travelers. Given the origin of the novel’s title and the fact that the story details the strange odyssey of the Bundren family, I could not help but draw comparisons to the storms of epic poetry. A catastrophic storm is an epic convention that often scatters travelers and creates new challenges in their journey as seen in Virgil, Homer, and others. This “cyclone” certainly presages the death of Addie and the hardships that the Bundren family will face in an attempt to bury her (42). I saw another example of classical foreshadowing in the talk of the buzzards. In Homer, exposure of the unburied dead to the animals was seen as a polluting agent that would keep misfortune around, and the incompletion of Addie’s burial wishes is comparable to this; the family will face difficulties until Addie is buried in Jefferson.