“The Roads Is Good Now”: Rural Infrastructure in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

abstract: This essay examines the depiction of rural infrastructure and its socioeconomic ramifications in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying . Focusing on the novel’s portrayal of roads, the essay explores how infrastructural development becomes emblematic of modernization’s uneven impact on rural Southern communities. Reading the novel’s road imagery “infrastructurally” illuminates Faulkner’s critique of the Good Roads Movement and explores the broader implications this has on interpretations of space, mobility, and modernity in the US South. The novel formalizes the infrastructural “gaps” created by the development of roads through its experimental aesthetic economy, demonstrating how Faulkner’s modernism is inextricably entangled in the cultural, material, and technological conditions of Southern modernity from which it emerges.