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

She finds Vardaman in the barn. He is relieved to see that Dewey Dell shares his anger about Peabody.

After Vardaman leaves, she gazes at the "secret clumps." She sees lightning in the distance. Everything else is "dead": the oppressive air, the earth, the darkness. In the last line, Faulkner reminds you that amid these images of death Dewey Dell is, like Persephone, a life-giving, fertile part of nature--"like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth."

15. VARDAMAN

Vardaman continues to grope for an understanding of his mother's death. Study the way Faulkner captures a child's mind by showing it rather than describing it.

Pausing over the first paragraph here, as in the other sections, will help you get your bearings. Vardaman is watching Cash finish the coffin, and he is thinking of the time he got shut up in a corn crib. He remembers how hard it was to breathe, and he remembers his fear.

NOTE: FAULKNER'S USE OF OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVES If someone tells you about a beautiful, smiling baby, how do you feel? The description might make people who love babies feel happy. For them, the baby objectifies happiness.

The U.S.-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) mastered the art of presenting emotions as objects, or even scenes, and having his readers "feel" what he was talking about. He called these scenes, or objects, "objective correlatives." Faulkner, a great fan of Eliot, uses objective correlatives throughout As I Lay Dying to get you to experience his characters' feelings.

What feeling is he trying to have you share in the opening paragraph of this section? What words does he use? How does he use punctuation to heighten this feeling?

Vardaman associates being shut up in a corn crib with being shut up in a coffin. It's not a very apt analogy, because Addie is dead. But Vardaman, in real pain ("the bleeding plank" is the clue here, if any is needed), has taken the adults at their word (see section 12) and decided that Addie has literally gone away. The trouble is, he can't find her, or "catch her," as he said in section 13.

He's convinced now that the woman lying in the bed was not his mother. "She went away when the other one laid down on her bed...."

Since he knows he couldn't breathe in the corn crib, he knows his mother--he is sure she is still alive--couldn't breathe in a nailed-up coffin. And so he's sure she wouldn't allow herself to be nailed up. "So if she lets him it is not her." Only an impostor would let Cash nail her into a coffin.

But if the dead woman is an impostor, where is Addie? The fish he caught and cut up pops into his mind. Before the fish showed up, his mother was alive. "Then it wasn't and she was, and now it is and she wasn't."

He decides, without saying it yet, that his mother is the fish. Tomorrow the family will eat it. "And she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell...."

The imagined eating of the fish serves as a Christian reference, some readers believe. In this view, the chopped-up fish is a parallel to the symbolic eating and drinking of Christ in Holy Communion as a way of preventing the believer's death. You will have a chance to further explore this interpretation in the discussion of section 19.

As this section ends, Vardaman remembers that Vernon Tull saw the fish. Maybe he can find it, he figures, if he gets Vernon to help him.

NOTE: BANANAS AND ELECTRIC TRAINS Something else you learned in this section is that Dewey Dell whetted Vardaman's appetite for the journey to Jefferson. Apparently she promised that they'll get bananas there--a real luxury for a poor country boy--and maybe look at an electric train in a store window. Now Vardaman has a goal in Jefferson, just like Anse and Dewey Dell.

16. TULL

In this section, you see the first stirrings among the Bundrens' neighbors as they hear of Addie's death.

Cora takes the arrival of Peabody's panicked team of horses as a sign that Addie is dead. But Vernon is in no mind to hitch the team and drive to the Bundrens'. He wants to sleep.

Vardaman wakes the Tulls around midnight. He has walked four miles through the mud to get there, and all he wants to talk about is the fish. "He's outen his head with grief and worry," Cora says, quite sensibly. Vernon thinks she may be going a bit far to say that Vardaman's confusion is God's judgment on Anse Bundren. "The Lord's got more to do than that. He's bound to have. Because the only burden Anse Bundren's ever had is himself."

NOTE: FOLK HUMOR IN FAULKNER America has a strong tradition of homespun, or folk, humor. Most humorists in this tradition lace their stories with seemingly naive comments that on closer inspection often turn out to be nuggets of wisdom. It is this irony--the tension between what a person seems to say and what he is actually saying--that triggers the laughs.

Faulkner makes Vernon Tull one of the art's most engaging practitioners. It's hard to believe that Tull could answer the door, hold up his lamp, and miss seeing Vardaman, no matter how short the boy is. He's spinning a tall tale--something you know is preposterous, but which you allow the teller to get away with because it's so entertaining.

There are many instances of folk humor in this section alone. The matter-of-fact way Tull tells how Addie got two holes bored into her face is a fine example of the grotesque violence that occurs in many tall tales. How did you react to this scene? With shock? Laughter? Both?

With Vardaman sitting between them, Cora and Vernon drive through the rain to the Bundrens'. There, Vernon helps Cash finish the coffin.

Vardaman opens the windows next to Addie's bed twice, to let her breathe. This prepares you for his boring holes through the coffin lid later.