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

9. ANSE

In this section you learn that the image most people have of Anse is accurate. He's selfish and luckless, and too adept at rationalizing his laziness to make any effort to change his fortunes. Yet Faulkner paints a picture of him that draws our sympathy. Watch how he does it.

Anse stands in front of the house, gazing at the road and contemplating his bad luck. He traces his misfortunes to the road, which brings "every bad luck" to his house.

NOTE: THE IMAGE OF THE ROAD Faulkner once told a critic that the idea for As I Lay Dying grew out of a story someone told him about a man who was angry at a road because it brought trouble to his house. Preposterous as it seems, Faulkner has Anse develop that idea here.

The passage foreshadows the novel's basic story line. Spectacular calamities will happen on the road to Jefferson.

Significantly, Anse implies that traveling is a flaunting of God's will. God built man to stay put, like a tree, he says. Could he be suggesting that the Bundrens' journey will be in some way a defiance of the gods?

Old Doc Peabody pops into Anse's thoughts without warning. Clues in other sections suggest that Anse sent for him, even though he shudders at the thought of paying a doctor. So it's unclear why he tells Peabody, "I never sent for you." Perhaps that is Anse's way of gaining Peabody's promise not to tell Addie that he had done so.

Peabody goes in to see Addie, leaving Anse to curse his bad luck. He can envision rain coming up the road and finding only his house. In an echo from job, he wonders why a sinless man must suffer such torment.

Vardaman reappears, bloody from gutting his fish. Anse tells him to wash his hands. The order probably reminds him of Addie, for he thinks of how hard she worked to make her sons "right." Suddenly he feels drained, unable "to get no heart into anything." Vardaman drives Anse's pain home with a question about Addie's health.

As the section ends, Anse isn't crying. Nonetheless, he may remind you of that classic portrait of a clown with a smile painted on his face and a tear rolling down his cheek.

10. DARL

Darl shows an unattractive side to his personality in this short section. He gets a perverse pleasure from taunting Jewel about Addie's death and Dewey Dell about her pregnancy.

Sitting behind Jewel on the wagon, Darl asks his brother again and again if he knows Addie is going to die. Jewel never responds.

Darl then recalls taunting Dewey Dell about her eagerness to get to town. But she can't bring herself to admit that she is pregnant any more than Jewel, in an earlier scene, could refer to his mother's coffin.

Why should Dewey Dell want to get to town? You've probably guessed by now that she hopes to have an abortion.

Faulkner ends the section with an image of Hades, or the underworld. An hour before darkness, the sun "is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads," and the air smells like sulfur. All-knowing, Darl realizes that Peabody will have to be pulled up the steep hill to the Bundrens' house on a rope--"balloon-like up the sulphurous air."

11. PEABODY

In Doc Peabody, you meet one of the most trustworthy outside observers of the Bundren family. A hefty old man, he is full of knowledge and wisdom.

Peabody realized as soon as the weather turned bad that it had been Anse and no one else who called for him. "Nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone." He also realized that if Anse thought he needed a doctor, the patient was beyond hope.

NOTE: DEATH AS A STATE OF MIND Peabody presents his view of death as "merely a function of the mind--and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement." He disputes those who say death is the end as well as those who call it a beginning. To Peabody, death is just like someone moving out of town and living on in the memory of his former neighbors.

Addie is not yet dead. But you can be sure that, even in death, she will be present in the lives of the survivors. The promise she extracted from Anse--to bury her in Jefferson--will ensure it. The ability of the dead to shape life, to motivate the living, is one of the major themes of the novel.

Outside on the porch, Peabody chews out Anse for waiting so long to call him. Peabody suspects he didn't want to pay a doctor's bill. But Anse suggests--here as in the fifth section--another reason for delaying: his fear that, once Addie saw Peabody, she would simply die.

And that seems to be what has happened. Dewey Dell calls Anse to Addie's bedside. Addie is near death.

Her eyes drive Peabody out of the room. Outside, he can hear Addie call Cash in a strong voice.

Peabody tries to explain why a woman would reject sympathy and help and cling, instead, to Anse, a "trifling animal." Such, Peabody says, is "the love that passeth understanding: that pride, that furious desire to hide that abject nakedness which we bring here with us [and] carry... with us into the earth again."