AT THE OPENING OF William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930), the character Darl Bundren describes his route through the field to the house where his mother lies dying. “The path runs straight as a plumb line,” he states. Yet at the center of the field, the path encounters a cotton house, which it encircles. The path does not simply reach a nexus where it branches off; rather, its linear trajectory is impeded. This momentary loss of linearity in the narrative prefigures a profound failure of linearity of the narrative, so that the novel's literary form uses performativity to unsettle the convention of unidirectional progress. This claim at first seems counterintuitive, since As I Lay Dying appears to develop along a linear course from beginning to end. The plot, for example, involves the Bundren family's journey from their country homestead, where Addie Bundren dies, to the town of Jefferson, where she is buried by her husband Anse Bundren. As Patrick Samway admits, the novel “appears to have a deceptively uncomplicated plotline that centers on honoring the request of a dying woman to be buried in her hometown.” On the surface, the novel exhibits an identifiable complication (Addie's death) and a seemingly straight, unidirectional drive toward its resolution (Addie's burial). What could be more straightforward than movement toward such closure? But like the path in the field whose initial straightforwardness belies an equivocacy of trajectory, Faulkner's novel unsettles and overturns the notion of unidirectional temporality. Indeed, As I Lay Dying can be viewed as a counter-narrative, because it surreptitiously enacts a chiasmatic model of time whereby past, present, and future overlap not just in narrative organization of the story, but in the story world itself. This textual project destabilizes the very notion of straightforward progressive reading. Arguing for the fixed forward momentum of a text, Gérard Genette states that a written literary narrative