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

17. DARL

Of all the Bundrens, Darl so far seems the most perceptive and reflective. He alone is clairvoyant, as has been shown earlier. Faulkner calls attention to these powers in this section, where Darl describes still another scene that he does not witness in person.

Faulkner handles the opening in an almost cinematic way. He focuses our attention first on the source of light--sooty, cracked lantern--and then on the scene its "feeble and sultry glare" illuminates. Cash continues to labor over the coffin. The saw's shadow is about six feet long and appears to be cutting through Anse's "shabby and aimless silhouette."

NOTE: THE SCENT OF SULFUR The air still smells of sulfur. As pointed out earlier, that could be a tipoff that in Faulkner's view the Bundrens inhabit some sort of underworld. Sulfur is the brimstone, or burning stone, associated with Hell and the fiery punishments inflicted there.

Anse is no help at all. Cash sends him into the house to "get something to cover the lantern" from the rain. Anse returns from his mission wearing Jewel's raincoat and carrying Dewey Dell's, which Cash uses to make a roof over the lantern. It wouldn't occur to Anse to offer the raincoat he's wearing to his son.

The Tulls arrive and lend Cora's raincoat to Cash. Vernon helps Cash finish the coffin. Anse keeps himself busy picking up tools and laying them down. After Anse accidentally knocks down the makeshift roof over the lantern, Cash ushers him into the house to keep him out of trouble.

NOTE: THE DEPTH OF ANSE'S GRIEF Anse is such a complicated character, and Faulkner handles him so ambiguously, that it's hard to tell how he feels about Addie's death. Perhaps he's not even sure himself. In the rain, his own face is twice shown to be "streaming," as if with tears.

Faulkner describes his wet face as "a monstrous burlesque of all bereavement"--a mockery, not the real thing at all. In section 14, there also seemed something phony about his momentary inability to eat. Some readers think he is too selfish and too emotionally dead to mourn. Others think he just does not know how, although he feels a duty to do so. Still others feel he is genuinely grieved by his loss but too much of a bumbler to show it plainly.

There's a fine passage toward the end of the section that lets you see how Faulkner can shift moods unexpectedly, sometimes with comic effect. It has stopped raining. In the dark before dawn, the men carry the completed coffin into the house and place it next to Addie's bed. Faulkner captures the solemnity of the moment by describing their slow, careful, awkward movements "as though for a long time they have not walked on floors." Then Peabody says, "Let's eat a snack," and the solemnity evaporates as abruptly as it did in section 12 when Anse said, "Now I can get them teeth."

In both cases, Faulkner brings you back suddenly to the petty concerns of the living. Can you suggest why?

In the final two paragraphs, you are with Darl's thoughts as he and Jewel lie awake in a "strange room" miles away. He is questioning himself, wondering not just who he is but whether he exists at all.

This is the first sign you get that Darl may be haunted by such questions. Maybe Vernon Tull was on to something when he said that Darl's main problem is thinking too much.

18. CASH

Faulkner presents Cash's thought processes here in an unusual way--in the form of a list. The subject of the list is structure--of houses, beds, bodies, and coffins. But the list also mimics the structure of Cash's mind.

A list is an arresting format and, in Cash's case, it seems an appropriate one. Cash is a methodical man, as you have seen already. He took infinite care on the coffin, planing off the inside edges of its lid and sides.

This beveling to make the lid fit snugly was time-consuming, as Tull pointed out. But Cash has his reasons for spending the extra time, and he presents them here.

As you read them, you may dismiss some as nonsensical. To an educated mind, it may seem ignorant to speak of the "sideways" stress on a bed's joints and of the "slanting" stress caused by a dead body's animal magnetism. But Cash is simply piecing together elements of folk wisdom into a coherent set of principles to guide his work. The methodical nature of the list reflects his methodical mind.

The 13th and final entry--"It makes a neater job"--may seem to you the most important reason for beveling the coffin's lid and sides. Not to Cash. Can you think why?

19. VARDAMAN

This is the shortest of the 59 sections, yet it has raised, to many readers, several knotty problems.

What is Vardaman getting at by equating his mother with a fish? Is there a larger symbolic meaning here that provides a key to understand As I Lay Dying? This is a good place to pause and make a stab at those questions.

NOTE: VARDAMAN'S MENTAL FACULTIES Some readers have assumed that Vardaman is retarded, like the character Benjy Compson in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Other readers feel that he seems irrational only after Addie dies and he tries to make sense of the mystery of her death. The trauma of his mother's death and his primitive idea of the world lead him to a conclusion that seems entirely logical to his young and troubled mind. This view got support from Faulkner himself, who told a college class in the 1950s that Vardaman is not retarded.

20. TULL

Addie's funeral takes place the morning after her death. Vernon Tull describes the day from the time he returned to the Bundrens' at ten o'clock in the morning until he took his family home again in the wagon. In the interval you meet some neighbors, get a glimpse of Preacher Whitfield.

You learn in the first paragraph that the river has been rising to record heights and that the bridge across it is in danger of collapsing. Whitfield shows up with the news that it has fallen. Lon Quick II, the son of the man who sold Jewel the horse, notes that God will probably help Anse get Addie across the river somehow. "He's took care of Anse a long time, now," he says. Another man chimes in, echoing Tull's thought in section 8: "I reckon He's like everybody else around here. He's done it so long now He can't quit."