What happens in Chapter 20 of As I Lay Dying?
Chapter 20 focuses on Cash, the eldest son of the Bundren family and their carpenter, and it serves as a strikingly brief interlude. The family is en route to Jefferson, carrying Addie's coffin, and Cash’s section resembles less a personal reflection and more a numbered list — a carpenter's detailed rationale for constructing the coffin on the bevel. Each point is succinct, practical, and almost contractual. Cash isn't expressing grief in any recognizable way; instead, he is addressing a problem rooted in wood and geometry. The list outlines both the practical and philosophical reasons for choosing the bevel: it evenly distributes weight, fits the body's natural shape, and simply represents the right approach to the task. Faulkner provides Cash with no subordinate clauses or lyrical detours. The chapter concludes as abruptly as it starts, with the numbered sequence finishing without any fanfare. In contrast to the ornate mourning and stream-of-consciousness style of the surrounding chapters — such as Darl's visions and Dewey Dell's physical panic — Cash’s straightforward prose feels almost humorous in its restraint, yet it quietly underscores the profound silence regarding his mother’s death.
Analysis
Faulkner's choice to present Cash's third monologue as a numbered list stands out as one of the novel's boldest formal moves. While other Bundren characters spiral inward — Darl into a near-mystical perception and Vardaman into fragmented grief — Cash channels everything outward onto the object he has created. The coffin serves as both a distraction and an unspoken love letter, even if Cash would never frame it that way. The bevel becomes his elegy.
The list format achieves multiple effects simultaneously. It mocks the rational, empirical mind attempting to impose order on death — which is the ultimate chaos — and through this, Faulkner subtly critiques a brand of American stoicism that confuses competence with genuine feeling. However, Cash is never ridiculed. His meticulousness represents a distinct form of devotion; the attention he dedicates to joinery reflects the care he struggles to articulate.
Tonal contrast drives the chapter forward. In contrast to Darl's fluid, almost all-knowing narration and Dewey Dell's visceral inner experience, Cash's numbered points seem to belong to an entirely different genre — like a technical manual inserted into a modernist novel. This clash is intentional. Faulkner portrays the varied ways a family copes with loss: some through words, some through silence, and others through the precise angle of a saw cut. Additionally, the chapter reinforces a central motif — craft as a form of moral seriousness — which reemerges when Cash's broken leg is encased in concrete, his body becoming a kind of flawed carpentry. At least in this instance, the work is executed correctly.
Key quotes from Chapter 20
“I made it on the bevel. 1. There is more surface for the nails to grip. 2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam. 3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant. Water moves easiest up and down or straight across.”
Cash opens his numbered list, presenting the engineering logic behind the coffin's construction — the closest he comes to a eulogy for Addie.
“4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the time. So the seams and joints are made up-and-down. Because the stress is up-and-down. 5. In a bed where people lie down all the time, the joints and seams are made sideways, because the stress is sideways.”
Cash extends his structural reasoning into a quiet, unsentimental meditation on the postures of the living versus the dead.
“6. Except. A body is not square like a crosstie.”
The list's single-sentence exception — the only moment Cash's logic acknowledges the irreducible fact of a human body — lands with the weight of an entire grief.