This is a Second Year essay that I wrote back in the day, when there were still days to be had. It has its flaws and the prof's comments and criticisms are in red. It got a fairly good "grade", but I wonder if it would it pass muster today? Well, enjoy it as best you can.
Cheers, Jake.
“…that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern;
that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world
is a work of art…” (Virginia Woolf)
As I Lay Dying is an exploration of the fundamental
isolation that exists at the heart of each person’s life. In the opening scene,
Darl and Jewel walk along a path “worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by
July.” (3) For Darl, the path is followed until he reaches the
spring. Jewel, however, with “pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face…endued
with life from the hips down” (3-4) breaks stride and leaves the path, then later
returns to it and continues on his way to the spring.
The path, the
silent journey, the inward private world of Darl’s thoughts and observations
set in place for us the shape and scope of Faulkner’s study of individual
consciousness and its role in human relationships. Through Darl’s eyes we
first see the field and path, Jewel, the cotton house, and the coffin. Through
his ears we hear the sound of Cash’s adze blade. Then abruptly in the next
chapter, we begin again, experiencing the world this time through the thoughts
and observations of Cora. And so on through several more chapters, while each
character introduces us to his or her private view of the world.
The setting in
As I Lay Dying is important, both to facilitate the development and
presentation of Faulkner’s major themes, and to provide a rich source for his
imagery. In the rural landscape, the reader expects to be drawn to images of
soil, growth and vegetation, to descriptions of the land, the sky and weather,
to temperature, colour and smell. We expect to be presented with a rich portrait of natural imagery within which the characters of the novel exist. Thus,
one of the striking elements of this work is the lack of this ‘objective
landscape’, or perhaps to say it more clearly, with respect to the characters’
perceptions, there is a lack of a shared consensus as to the nature of the world.
Because of the multiple points of view (the story is told through as many as
fifteen perspectives), Faulkner paints with broad brush strokes only the most
basic setting—a post-World War One July day in rural Mississippi; a poor family
living on an isolated cotton farm, an approaching storm, and a journey of some
distance to the town of Jefferson. He allows each character to present the
world (their world, the world as they see it, with their own interpretations of
time, event and motivation) that leaves us with a picture of people, not so much
being on the land at a particular time and place, but rather being in the
land, being at once a part of its character and at the same time shaping it
with metaphor, “like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and
creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image…” (41)
Images of the
land, the elements—earth, wind, fire and water—are presented to us,
constituting not so much a particular landscape, but something closer to an interior landscape of each individual. Also interesting is to note that such
imagery would be less available in an urban setting where nature is more
controlled and muted, and where laws more efficiently regulate our social
relations; where distances are shorter and where communication is much faster,
making it more difficult to depict the intensely personalized isolation of
someone like Addie or Darl or Dewey Dell. (Addie’s burial, for example, would
have occurred more quickly and efficiently in the city.) As well, an urban
setting would tend to foster the acceptance of a more commonly-held view of the
world, disguising or perhaps entirely negating private visions of the world,
the ones Faulkner wishes to explore. One compares his presentation, for example, of Macgowan’s limited, yet commonly held view of sexuality as a way to acquire
social status, with the passionate, private vision of Addie’s: “I believed
that I had found it. I believed that the reason was the duty to the alive, to the
terrible blood, the red bitter flood boiling through the land.” (161) [You might include the Macgowan ref., even though you don’t
quote it directly, just for the reader’s convenience.]
Additionally,
the importance of setting as it relates to the imagery in the novel lies in the
relative simplicity of the rural versus the urban landscape. Simple, in the
sense that two people standing in a field experience approximately the same
things, with perhaps vastly different interpretations. However, the same two
people standing in a city street may experience vastly different things
depending on how busy the street is, or where they are looking, or how long
they remain there. The urban landscape is more highly concentrated and therefore
is less apt to be commonly experienced by a broad range of people at any given moment. for example, in one scene, for
Darl, the sun sets “like a bloody egg upon the crest of thunderheads; the light
has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of
lightning.” (36) [Interesting idea] For Peabody,
the same sun has simply, “gone down…like a load of cinders.” (37) Interesting
here is a technique that Faulkner uses to create setting. He outlines in one
chapter particular elements of the scene—the sky at sunset or, elsewhere, the
river or the road—and in the following chapter he presents those same elements
but from a different character’s perspective, creating continuity of setting
but forcing the reader to examine one of his major themes, namely the
uniqueness of individual perception.
Thematically,
this rural setting provides Faulkner with the opportunity to present clearly
such examples of individual human perceptions: two people see the same event—a
sunset—but in dramatically different terms. Darl sees it in visionary, ominous
terms, Peabody in perhaps more pedantic [load of
cinders ref.?] terms. Here Darl also personifies nature; [Not quite—an egg, even a human one does not equal a
person] in this case the sun is a bloody egg, a reference perhaps to
Dewey Dell’s pregnancy. Vardaman also imbues natural events with human [again, not quite] qualities when he sees “the dark
stand up and go whirling away” (59), or when the “top of the barn comes
swooping up out of the twilight.” (49) Not only do natural events and settings
take on human characteristics, but so too do human beings become, [or vice versa] at times, part of the setting. For
example, Dewey Delly says, “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth”
(58) There are numerous references to Jewel being wooden-like: “wooden-backed,
wooden-faced” (193), his eyes like pale wooden eyes” (17). Addie’s hands are,
“like two of them roots dug up.” (13) And there is the striking image of Darl’s
eyes, “full of the land dug out of his skull and the holes filled with distance
beyond the land.”(23)With this
imagery of eyes, we are aware of another technique Faulkner uses to create
setting and establish mood and expectation. Throughout the novel, groups of
images reoccur. There are references
to eyes as “pieces of broken plate” (112), “eyes [that] were two colours of
wood” (168) or like “pieces of burnt-out cinder” (28), or “eyes full of the
land.” (32) Here we note eye imagery is most often associated with either land
or wood, and we are drawn to make connections that we would not normally make
between land, wood and the people—of Jewel, for
example, who is seen as rigid, implacable—like wood.
Wood imagery, appropriate
for story’s the rural setting, occurs throughout the novel in reference to
Jewel, the coffin, buildings. Another recurring motif, rain, foreshadows the
impending storm. Tull mentions it three times in as many pages. As well, the imagery
of sounds is striking. Sound seem at times to exist independently, almost
detached from their sources, as when Darl observes, “the sounds ceasing without
departing, as if any movement might dislodge them” (67), or when Tull notes the
sound of the women’s voices singing at Addie’s funeral: “It’s like they hadn’t
gone away. It’s like they just disappeared into the air.” (82) And of course there
is the sound of Cash’s saw, in the earlier sections, as a constant background.
Such imagery develops setting, creates atmosphere and allows Faulkner to explore thematically.
Our vision of Addie, Darl and to a lesser extent Dewey Dell (and perhaps
Vardaman) is of people who are aware of the profound isolation each of them
lives with, and who are also aware of the need to act, with passion, to make
those necessary connections which will bring them into the world—in the sense that
they achieve both an experience and an understanding of their place there, one
which has nothing to do with “words [that] go up in a thin line, quick and
harmless.” (160)
In discussing
the importance of setting to the novel, we turn to the setting of the wagon
where almost two-thirds of the story takes place—either on the wagon itself or
during the trip to Jefferson. One of the most powerful images that remains with
the reader is of the family, perched atop Addie’s coffin in the slowly moving
wagon, each alone with their own private thoughts but all compelled to complete
the macabre journey. For Darl, the wagon ride is “soporific, so dreamlike”
(95), the road is like part of a wheel, “beyond it the road lies like a spoke
of which Addie Bundren is the rim.” (95) This image, the setting, the
archetypal metaphor of wheel, creates for us a powerful atmosphere of inertia.
Everyone on the wagon, including the passionate Jewel, cannot act. Everyone is
compelled to transport the rotting corpse of Addie to its final destination. No one can
change this fate. No one can act, not even Darl, who knows, as the ghostly Addie does "how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it." (160) Nor can Dewey Dell, who suspects the truth of Addie’s words. Only
Addie acts. And she acts in the most articulate and irrevocable manner of all.
Her body, decomposing, is returning fully to the earth where she desires to be
and where she belongs. For Faulkner, this image is in perfect harmony with the
cyclical imperatives of rural life—planting and harvesting, birth and death,
growth and decay.
Darl said it
“takes two people to make you and one people to die. That’s how the world is
going to end.” (35) For Addie and for Darl, that knowledge is not enough.
______________________________________
Works Cited
Faulkner,
William. As I Lay Dying. Rev. ed. New
York: Random House. 1987
Rev. of Moments of Being: Unpublished
Autobiographical Writings by Virginia Woolf, New York Times Book Review, 14
Nov. 1975, n. page.
Grade = 86%
