Despite-or maybe because of-their perrneating the fabric of As I Lay Dying, the details and dynarnics of rural life, aesthetics, labor, and philosophy have not often been isolated and examined in scholarly discourse. This essay focuses on "the rural" in the nove! as an element that inforrns characters' attitudes, spatial configurations, and age ne y itself. Resisting a depiction of the rural that reduces it either to a Marxist fetish of labor or a Romantic idealization of aesthetic, Faulkner presents the pragmatics of rural life, space, and thinking. Faulkner's careful engagement with the rural is informative about his own time and resonant for ours, especially since the politics of the rural have become visible and newly powerful, particularly in the United States.