It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor, rural family's quest to honor her wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi as well as the motives—noble or selfish—they show on the journey.

Stubborn Anse frequently rejects any offers of assistance, including meals or lodging, so at times the family goes hungry and sleeps in barns.

At other times he refuses to accept loans from people, claiming he wishes to "be beholden to no man", thus manipulating the would-be lender into giving him charity as a gift not to be repaid.

Twice, the family almost loses Addie's coffin—first, while crossing a river on a washed-out bridge (two mules are lost) and then when a fire of suspicious origin starts in the barn where the coffin is being stored for the night.

After that happens, Darl, the second eldest and thoughtful, poetic observer of the family, is seized for the arson of the barn and sent to the Mississippi State Insane Asylum in Jackson.

[6] With Addie only just buried, Anse forces Dewey Dell to give up the money from Lafe (the man who got her pregnant) for an abortion, which he spends on getting "new teeth" and quickly marries the woman from whom he borrowed the shovels.

[8] Throughout the novel, Faulkner presents 15 points of view, each chapter narrated by one character, including Addie, who expresses her thoughts after she has already died.

[9] As I Lay Dying helped to solidify Faulkner's reputation as a pioneer, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, of stream of consciousness.

This represents an innovation on conventions of interior monologues; as Dorrit Cohn states in Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, the language in an interior monologue is "like the language a character speaks to others ... it accords with his time, his place, his social station, level of intelligence ..." The novel represents a progenitor of the Southern Renaissance, reflecting on being, existence, and other existential metaphysics of everyday life.