Addie and Anse, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra
The story of Agamemnon, as we heard it in The Odyssey involves his family killing him, then not respecting his dead body, not burying him properly, dooming him to suffer eternally in the afterlife. He is betrayed by his wife twice, because she is now with another man. The story of Agamemnon adds an interesting dimension to As I Lay Dying , when you consider the implications of the allusion in the title. Who, if anybody is Agamemnon? Clytemnestra? Who does the killing and who is being killed, beyond the literal things, and whose fault is it that everybody in the Bundren family is kind of messed up? In book 11, lines 424-29 of The Odyssey , Agamemnon narrates his own death like this: As I lay dying, struck through by the sword, I tried to lift my arms up from the ground. That she-dog turned away. I went to Hades. She did not even shut my eyes or close my mouth. There is no more disgusting act than when a wife betrays a man like that. These lines