"Cliff Notes - As I Lay Dying" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

The first line--"It was the sweetest thing I ever saw"--sets the tone and lets us know we're in for another string of platitudes. Faulkner delays his punch line in this extended joke, so it's a long while before you learn what she sees. By that time, her credibility as a reporter has been so destroyed, you end up wondering if she saw anything at all.

Somehow, Cora has persuaded herself that Darl has gone to haul a load of lumber against his will. "But nothing would do but Anse and Jewel must make that three dollars," Cora says.

What does this misinterpretation allow her to do? Cora wouldn't have expected anything better from Anse, she says. But she is outraged that the lure of three dollars would induce Jewel to turn his back on the mother who showed him "downright partiality."

She exempts Darl from her blanket condemnation. On his way out of the house, he stopped by Addie's door. "He just stood and looked at his dying mother, his heart too full for words."

Dewey Dell gives another version of the same scene in the next section. In its own way, as you will see, her version is as complicated as Cora's. By putting two opposite interpretations of the same event side by side, Faulkner is calling attention to the subjective nature of experience. The human ability to interpret events in an entirely personal way ensures that there will always be an unbridgeable gap between even close relatives. The isolation of individuals within a group--a seeming paradox--is one of the major themes of As I Lay Dying.

7. DEWEY DELL

Dewey Dell is one of Faulkner's most successful comic characters, and in this section you see why. Her name suggests a sensual being, a part of nature. Although Faulkner mocks her, he treats her with affection, as he does Anse.

Half of her brief section is a hilarious attempt to shed the blame for her seduction and subsequent pregnancy. The seducer is someone named Lafe, who has come to help the Bundrens harvest their cotton crop. Woods border the cotton field, and Dewey Dell and Lafe happen to be picking down a row towards this "secret shade."

As they move closer to the trees and Dewey Dell's fever rises, she creates a game that allows her to think that she has no responsibility for her actions. If her sack is full of cotton by the time they reach the woods, she will let herself be seduced. If it isn't full, she will continue picking cotton up the next row, away from the woods.

She may have been thinking out loud. For Lafe ends up picking into her sack. At the end of the row, her sack is full of cotton--"and I could not help it," she says.

NOTE: THE PERSEPHONE MYTH In Greek myth, there's a lovely story about Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. Persephone was the goddess of spring and therefore of fertility. One day Pluto, king of the underworld, or Hades, seized her and held her captive. Her mother, Demeter, as goddess of vegetation the major fertility goddess, managed to persuade the gods to have Persephone returned to her. But Pluto tricked Persephone into eating a pomegranate, the food of the dead. So for four months every year she had to return to the underworld. The flowers and grain died whenever she left the earth, but when she returned, the flowers blossomed and everything grew again. The story symbolizes the annual vegetation cycle--the end of the growing season in the fall and its return in the spring.

Some readers hear echoes of this myth in As I Lay Dying. They see the fertile Dewey Dell suggesting Persephone. Lafe, who has come from town to harvest cotton, suggests Pluto. Lafe lured Dewey Dell into the "secret shade," a place whose very name hints at the underworld.

You may want to ponder what all this might mean--if anything. Some readers feel that if Faulkner is using the Persephone myth, he is doing so only to show how far Dewey Dell veers from it. For Dewey Dell is surely not comfortable with her fertility. She will spend a lot of the book thinking about, or actually seeking, an abortion.

Darl has a special relationship with Dewey Dell. They can communicate without speaking. Darl knows she is pregnant, and Dewey Dell hates him for knowing.

At Addie's door--the same door where Cora saw him standing silently--he tells Dewey Dell that Addie is going to die before he and Jewel return. "Then why are you taking Jewel?" she asks. Because, he answers, he wants Jewel to help him load the wagon.

This is all very strange, this conversation without sound. But don't forget that Darl has seemed clairvoyant before, and that, as Cora reported, he's the Bundren "that folks say is queer."

Dewey Dell makes some interesting comments about other family members here. She reinforces the view that Anse is lazy and crafty. And she says that Jewel has concerns that the rest of the family don't share. Her choice of words (he is not "care-kin") suggests, in fact, that Jewel is in some way unrelated to the rest of the Bundrens. This is an interesting clue to his character.

8. TULL

Faulkner continues to introduce his cast of characters with this section, narrated by Cora's husband, Vernon. And he brings one of the novel's central images, a fish, into the story for the first time.

Anse and Vernon sit on the back porch after Jewel and Darl have left. Vernon's thoughts wander from the weather ("It's fixing to rain tonight") to the hard life all women have. The men make a reference to the Book of Job. "The Lord giveth," Anse says, reciting part of the prayer in which Job acknowledges and accepts God's will.

Addie's youngest son, Vardaman, comes up the hill carrying a fish he wants to show Addie. It's unclear how old Vardaman is. But if the fish he caught is "nigh as long as he is," it's a fair bet that he isn't older than eight or nine. On Anse's orders, Vardaman lugs the fish away to clean it.

NOTE: VARDAMAN'S NAME Vardaman is named after James Kimble Vardaman (1861-1930), a Mississippi politician who died the year Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying. Vardaman won the governorship in 1903 by exploiting the racial prejudices of poor white farmers like the Bundrens. Faulkner once pointed out that poor whites in Mississippi often named their children after politicians like Vardaman, who pretended to show an interest in their concerns.

At five o'clock, the Tulls say their goodbyes to Anse. Vernon offers to help him bring in his corn. Cash is still working on the coffin outside the house. As they pass him, Vernon mutters a silent hope that Cash will work as carefully on the Tulls' barn as he does on the coffin. As you'll see, nearly everyone in this book has something else besides Addie on their minds.

Vernon Tull seems to be a narrator you can trust, one who passes no judgment on events or people he reports on. Like Dewey Dell and Darl, he points out how dependent on others Anse is. These observations belie Anse's own claim, in section 5, that he has never been "beholden" to anyone.

Even Kate Tull, who continues to smolder over the rejected cakes, notes how dependent Anse is. If Addie dies, she predicts, he'll get another wife "before cotton-picking."