The Grinning Reaper: Death and black comedy in As I Lay DyingIn the world of William Faulkner, what is often described as morbid can also be taken as ironic by the reader, especially when it comes to his most beloved and troubled clan, the Bundren family. Throughout the novel, the Bundrens are beset by many unfortunate burdens on their journey to bury their nine-day-deceased mother, most of which find the reader both grimacing and laughing at the same time. I will use the new critical approach for my article, which treated literary texts as autonomous and separate from historical context in order to bring the focus of literary studies back to the analysis of texts. The New Critics also intended to exclude reader response, authorial intention, cultural and historical frameworks, and moralistic prejudices from their analysis. Through New Critical analysis, readers can discern how different themes in the work come together to complete the novel as a whole; in this case, the dark comedy theme plays an important role in controlling the otherwise dark moments of the novel, creating a spectrum of emotions that complements the reader's experience. By implementing humor into the grisly circumstances of the treatment of Addie's body, Anse using his wife's funeral for personal gain, and Dewey Dell's quest for an abortion, Faulkner uses black comedy to lighten the theme of death in his Southern Gothic literature. The reason why Addie's body is kept on the surface is no mystery since she had asked her husband "to take me back to Jefferson when I die" (Faulkner 173), but one has to wonder why exactly she remained unburied for nine days after her death. The reader must look to the characters for clues as to why Addie is in the middle of paper......r Addie is torture, for Anse it is a means to profit, and for Dewey Dell is a solution. By elaborating such complex relationships with death, Faulkner also challenges the reader to evaluate what death means to them and how death can fulfill multiple roles in life. Through new criticism that examines the relationships between a text's ideas and its form, and through simple close reading of the text, the reader is forced to look at As I Lay Dying in a whole new sense. The reader is also confronted with how the most terrible and tragic events can produce the greatest humor, forcing us to question not only the fine line between tragedy and comedy, but also what the individual perceives as entertaining. This mixture of death and humor intoxicates the reader and effectively traps them in the world of the characters, their pain and what it means to be human..