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

We are back to Job again: "Naked I came out of my mother's womb," Job said, "and naked shall I return." We are born alone and we die alone, Peabody seems to say, but we spend our days trying to deny it.

NOTE: THE BUNDRENS' PRIDE In order to understand what motivates the Bundrens especially Addie--it's important to understand their pride. In general, pride is a lofty, sometimes arrogant, sense of one's own superiority. To many Christians, pride is a sin--an attempt to set oneself up as better than God. Elihu, one of Job's four counselors, accuses him of provoking God's wrath with his arrogant pride. (Cora will accuse Addie of such sinful behavior in section 39.)

In Faulkner's view, however, pride needn't be a negative value. He sees it as essential to man's dignity. It can and does, in this book, mean strength--the dignity that can hold a family together and enable it to overcome adversity. In a sense, the Bundrens' pride is of this heroic sort, as their journey to Jefferson will show.

12. DARL

Darl, with his clairvoyance, details the scene of Addie's death even though he is miles away at the time.

Addie's death is a special moment, one full of clues to many of the characters. Anse, Vardaman, and Dewey Dell are in the room when she dies.

Anse, ill at ease, is clumsy and touching by turns. While trying to tell her where Darl and Jewel are, he breaks off as if he doubts his own explanation. He puts his hand on hers just as she sits up to look out the window and call Cash. She dies looking at Vardaman, who backs out of the room in horror.

Cash comes to the room. Anse's sense of timing is off, as always. He queries Cash about his progress on the coffin while Cash is trying to come to grips with his loss. Without looking at Anse, Cash goes back to work. Anse tells Dewey to get some supper ready. She leaves, and Anse is alone with Addie. He touches her face and her hands and makes some awkward attempts to smooth the quilt covering her. He gives up and breaks the solemnity of the scene with the words, "God's will be done. Now I can get them teeth."

Three italicized paragraphs break up Darl's description of Addie's death. In one of them, Faulkner has Darl explain his and Jewel's plight. At the moment of their mother's death, they are stuck in a rainy ditch with a broken wheel.

In the second italicized paragraph, Darl reports an inconclusive exchange between Peabody and Dewey Dell. Peabody tries to comfort her. She tries to tell him how he could help her with an abortion. Yet, still unable to say the word "pregnant," even to herself, she cannot make her need clear.

The third italicized paragraph ends this section with Darl's announcement to Jewel that Addie is dead. Darl reports no reaction from Jewel, who at the time is straining against the axle, trying to raise it. It's curious how quickly Anse and Dewey Dell lapse into their own private concerns as soon as Addie is dead. Cash returns to his work, Jewel and Darl to theirs. Only Vardaman seems overwhelmed with grief.

13. VARDAMAN

In psychiatry, a trauma is a startling experience that has lasting effect on someone's mind. With this monologue, Faulkner gives you an "inside look" at a young boy's reaction to a traumatic event--his mother's death.

In the previous section, Vardaman was backing out of the room where his mother died. Now he has run through the house to the rear porch. Crying, he realizes he is standing near the spot where he dropped the fish when he first brought it home. He realizes that the fish is dead--"not-fish"--like his mother, who "is getting so far ahead I cannot catch her."

In the next paragraph, thoughts of his mother and the fish occur side by side, too. Thinking by analogy, he realizes that he killed and cut up the fish and assumes that someone must have killed his mother. Since she died after Peabody came, he blames Peabody. He rushes to the barn to get a stick, possibly intending to hit Peabody.

NOTE: JEWEL'S HORSE Pause to examine how Faulkner treats Jewel's horse in this section. Inside the barn, Vardaman leans against its warm body and cries, the way a child in pain might seek his mother's warmth. Like a mother, the horse is a life-giving force, and it seems to give Vardaman strength. "The life in him runs under the skin.... I can smell the life running up from under my hands, up my arms, and then I can leave the stall." Later, Darl will taunt Jewel about his mother being a horse, and you may want to return to this paragraph to piece together his meaning.

Vardaman doesn't hit Peabody. Instead, he strikes Peabody's horses, who race off pulling the buggy.

Back in the barn, Faulkner throws in a little comic relief in the segment about the lowing cow. Dewey Dell calls Vardaman for dinner. His mind returns to the fish that was alive one minute and dead the next. He can't make sense of it--of death. "And now she's gittin ready to cook hit."

14. DEWEY DELL

This section shows you Dewey Dell trying to cope with the burdens of her pregnancy and the chores she inherited from her mother. It also gives you a closer look at a mind unable to follow any train of thought for long.

Dewey Dell's monologue begins where Darl's report on her in section 12 left off. She is thinking that Peabody could help her end her pregnancy. She leaps from one idea to another and ends in frustration, because Peabody doesn't know she's pregnant and she can't tell him.

NOTE: DEWEY DELL'S ISOLATION One thread of thought is worth tracing here, because Dewey Dell touches on the theme of isolation that Faulkner pursues throughout the novel. In the second paragraph, she says that if she could feel the baby's presence she would not be alone.

Try to "translate" the rest of the paragraph. She seems to contradict herself twice. She says she would not be alone if she had an abortion, and that "Then I could be all right alone."

It sounds like gibberish, and many readers believe it is gibberish. Others, however, see no contradictions at all. She wouldn't be alone if she had an abortion, they explain, because Peabody would have her secret in his mind. But in another sense, she would be alone. She would not be carrying a child.

Her actions are as random as her mental processes. She stashes the mutilated fish in the cupboard, puts turnip greens and buttermilk on the table, and leaves the house to milk the cow and stare at the pine clumps where she was seduced. While she is doing all this, her thoughts jump about, from what Peabody could do for her, to Lafe and "the process of coming unalone"--of uniting with Lafe.