The title of As I Lay Dying is an allusion to Homer's The Odyssey. Supposedly Faulkner could quote from memory the speech that Agamemnon gives Odysseus in Book XI: "As I lay dying the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades." In As I Lay Dying, eyes are an important motif-- Jewel, for instance, is described as having "wooden eyes."
Another minor character in the The Odyssey is Elsinore, who falls off a roof, just like Cash. Also, Greek myth held that a body must be buried or else it would become a ghost.