Wai Chee Dimock, professor at Yale, concludes her discussion of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying by tracing its shifting balance of comic and tragic registers. She anchors the analysis in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, arguing that the novel moves between genres as one character's gain becomes another's loss. Working chapter by chapter, she follows Cash, Jewel, Anse, and Darl through the Bundren family's fractured economy of kinship, showing how the family's final configuration separates the 'haves' from the 'have nots.' Topics include the comic dimension of the fish subplot, Jewel's broken bond with animals, and the reconstitution of family ties by the novel's end. Part of the Yale course Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, recorded in Fall 2011 and available through Open Yale Courses, the lecture offers close textual reading grounded in the American literary tradition.