Illustrated book cover for As I Lay Dying: a man in a hat drives a mule-drawn wagon carrying a coffin down a muddy road past a weathered farmhouse, while the face of a dying woman appears faintly in the storm clouds above.

An Immersive Reading Experience · 59 Voices · One Journey

As I Lay Dying

by William Faulkner · published 1930 · now in the public domain

A story of a family. A journey. A body. All that remains.

Read the complete novel, one narrator at a time. As you read, mark the moments where Faulkner's craft is working on you — the stream of consciousness, the symbols, the shifts in voice — and build a reading journal you can export and hand to your professor.

Your annotations are saved privately in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere until you export it. Works offline once loaded.

As I Lay Dying · Reader's Journal
Section 1 of 59

Darl

Mark This Moment

Your Reading Journal

Export Your Report

Your report opens as a formatted page listing every annotation with its section number, narrator, paragraph, and approximate page, plus a visual summary of the lenses you used. Use your browser's Print → Save as PDF to submit it.

Include in the report
Format

Edit the Lenses

Teachers and students can reshape the tag set for their own course — rename a lens, rewrite its description or reflection prompt, change its color, add new lenses, or remove ones you won't use. Changes are saved in this browser and apply everywhere, including exports.

How This Works

1 · Read

The novel is presented exactly as Faulkner structured it: 59 sections, each spoken by one of 15 narrators. Use the Contents panel to jump between sections or filter by narrator. Your place, text size, and annotations are remembered.

2 · Mark the moments

Select any passage with your mouse or finger and a tag menu appears. Or use the ¶ button beside each paragraph (it appears on hover, and is always reachable by keyboard — press Tab through the text). Choose one of eight literary lenses, then write a short reflection. A prompt for each lens helps you get started.

You can also record an audio reflection (up to 2 minutes) instead of — or alongside — writing. Turn on live transcription to get an editable transcript as you speak, or type one yourself. Audio and transcript both travel with the annotation into your exported report.

3 · Export

When you're done (or done for the day), open Export Report. You'll get a visual document identifying every annotation by section, narrator, paragraph, and approximate page — ready to print or save as a PDF for your professor.

Accessibility

The Graphic Novel Companion

This reading experience shares its visual world with a graphic novel adaptation of As I Lay Dying currently in development — same palette, same character studies, same rain.

Prototype graphic novel page: sepia panels showing two brothers walking through a cotton field toward a farmhouse, Addie at the window, and Cash building the coffin, with typewritten narration boxes. Second prototype page: panels of the family gathering at Addie's deathbed as rain begins, ending with the sound of the saw — 'Skreee' — lettered across the final panels.

A future edition of this site will offer a side-by-side reading mode: Faulkner's prose on one page, the corresponding graphic novel panels on the facing page, sharing the same section numbering — so annotations you make here will line up with the adaptation, and you'll be able to tag adaptation choices as their own literary lens.

From the style guide

Graphic novel style guide sheet: visual tone thumbnails, an eight-color earth-tone palette, line and texture samples, typography and paneling rules, and small motif drawings of the coffin, mule wagon, fish, bridge, floodwater, buzzard, and fan. Character study sheet with sketches of the Bundren family — Addie, Anse, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, Vardaman — plus Cora Tull, and drawings of props: folding fan, hand saw, straw hat, mule tack, wagon wheel, coffin hardware, and work boots.

About, Citation & AI Disclosure

What this is

As I Lay Dying: An Immersive Reading Experience presents the complete text of William Faulkner's 1930 novel (which entered the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026) alongside an integrated reading-tracker designed for literature classrooms. It adapts the Reading Friction Tracker by replacing friction-based tags with literary lenses specific to this novel.

Privacy

All annotations — including audio reflections — live in your browser's local storage. Nothing is transmitted, tracked, or collected, and exporting produces a document on your own device. One opt-in exception: the "transcribe while I speak" feature uses your browser's built-in speech service, which sends audio to your browser's vendor (e.g., Google or Apple) during transcription only. Leave that box unchecked and recording stays entirely local; you can always type a transcript by hand.

Citation (CC0 1.0 — Public Domain Dedication)

Watkins, Marc. As I Lay Dying: An Immersive Reading Experience with Literary Tracker. 2026. Released under CC0 1.0 Universal — to the extent possible under law, the author has waived all copyright and related rights to this work. Novel text: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930), public domain in the United States.

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

AI disclosure

This project was created by Marc Watkins in collaboration with AI tools, disclosed here in the spirit of the transparency this site asks of students: