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

They spend the night at the Gillespies' farm. Darl sets fire to the barn where Addie's body is stored in an effort to spare his mother more degradation. However, Jewel saves her coffin with a heroic act. Dewey Dell, who hates Darl because he knows she is pregnant, realizes that Darl set the fire and tells the Gillespies.

The Bundrens reach Jefferson nine days after Addie's death. They dig her grave with borrowed shovels and then get on with their own lives. They commit Darl to the state insane asylum rather than pay the Gillespies for a new barn. A dishonest drugstore clerk takes advantage of Dewey Dell, who fails to get the abortion pills she wanted. Anse takes money from Dewey Dell, buys a set of false teeth, and marries a "duck-shaped" woman.


Faulkner provides you with two basic perspectives on the characters, allowing you to view them through their own interior monologues and through the eyes of others. You must sort through the different views to arrive at your own understanding of the Bundrens and their neighbors.

What follows is an exploration of the 15 characters whose interior monologues make up the novel. The seven Bundrens are presented first. The numbers after the characters' names refer to the sections they narrate. Faulkner didn't number the sections. They are numbered here to help you match your copy of the novel with the section-by-section discussion in this guide. (See the Note on Numbering the Monologues at the beginning of The Story section.)

^^^^^^^^^^AS I LAY DYING: ANSE BUNDREN [9, 26, 28]

Anse is a hill farmer who inherited his parents' farm just south of the Yoknapatawpha River, which crosses the southern end of Yoknapatawpha County. A lazy man, he has convinced himself that if he ever sweats, he will die. He is so ineffectual when confronted with obstacles that his sons have to make many of his decisions for him.

Yet he seems to mean well. When Addie dies, his grief appears genuine, although he can express it only clumsily. In at least one place--while staying at Samson's--his resolve to honor Addie's wish to be buried in Jefferson wavers. But in general he sticks to the promise he made to her 28 years earlier, at Darl's birth, and insists on taking her body to Jefferson, which he has not visited for 12 years.

Selfishness is one of his major motivations, and he is adept at deceiving himself: Some readers see Anse as a comic figure--a sad clown. Others view him as a villain, able to act only from selfish motives. But to people such as Addie, he's a "dead" person, substituting empty words for experience.

You should try to see whether Anse grows or otherwise changes during the course of the action. Study his words at the end of the book to determine whether he has gained insights into himself or anyone else since he first appeared in section 3.

^^^^^^^^^^AS I LAY DYING: ADDIE BUNDREN [40]

Though Anse's wife, Addie, is given only one monologue, her presence, even in death, dominates the novel. Born and raised in Jefferson, her father taught her that the purpose of living is to prepare for death. Her parents were dead and she was teaching school when she met Anse. She married him--"I took Anse," she said--in hopes of making the sort of intense, violent contact with another person that would give her life meaning.

Anse couldn't provide that experience. He could only talk about it--not the same thing at all, Addie points out. Cash, her firstborn, does penetrate the circle of solitude around her, and she loves him. Her attitude toward her children, whether love, hostility, or indifference, helps them define themselves and their response to her death.

About ten years after Darl's birth, she has a passionate affair with a preacher named Whitfield, who fathers her favorite son, Jewel. She makes amends to Anse by having two more children.

Despite her negative qualities, Addie may be visualized as a life force. She craves passionate encounters, violations of her "aloneness." Some readers have identified her with the myth of Demeter, the major goddess of fertility, and her daughter, Persephone, goddess of spring and thus also of fertility.

Other readers stress the barrenness of her life--her father's destructive teachings, her loneliness, her vengefulness, her rejection of Darl and her indifference toward Dewey Dell and Vardaman. These readers feel that Faulkner may be turning the Demeter-Persephone myth on its head, making Addie in death as well as in life a sort of goddess of infertility.

^^^^^^^^^^AS I LAY DYING: CASH BUNDREN [18, 22, 38, 53, 59]

Cash, at 29 or 30 Addie's oldest son, is a carpenter. His name is short for Cassius. His mother loved him, and he returns that love, painstakingly crafting her coffin outside her window in the opening scenes. A recognizable country type, his unexpected responses--to pain, for example, and to a question about the height of his fall from a church roof--are a source of humor. At the end of the book, his insights into the family relationships and Darl's sanity reveal him to be the wisest of the Bundrens, and perhaps the one most changed by the journey.

His lameness suggests to some readers a parallel with Hephaestus (also known as Vulcan or Mulciber), the Greek god of fire. Hephaestus was a kindly, peace-loving god, patron of handicrafts. Though lame, he made weapons and furnishings for the other gods.

^^^^^^^^^^AS I LAY DYING: DARL BUNDREN [1, 3, 5, 10, 12, 17, 21, 23, 25, 27, 32, 34, 37, 42,
46, 48, 50, 52, 57]

Darl, about 28 years old, narrates a third of the book and is easily the most perceptive of the Bundren children. A sort of mad poet, he is a type that always intrigued Faulkner and with whom he often identified. The neighbors consider him odd. He is clairvoyant, that is, able to understand unspoken thoughts and to describe scenes he doesn't witness.

Addie's rejection of him is the central fact of his life. His rivalry with Jewel, Addie's favorite son, is evident on the first page and continues to the end of the book. His sensitivity stems, at least in part, some readers think, from the wounds inflicted by his mother's rejection of him.

Why he sets fire to the barn is, like his sanity, a matter of debate. Many readers believe that he wanted to end the journey by burning Addie's decomposing corpse perhaps as an act of love, "to hide her away from the sight of man." Others see his setting of the fire as a mark of insanity, justifying his being committed to an asylum at Jackson at the end of the book. You will have an opportunity to offer your own explanation as you learn more about Darl.

^^^^^^^^^^AS I LAY DYING: JEWEL BUNDREN [4]

Jewel, Addie's son by Whitfield, is 18 years old. Like Pearl, the product of Hester Prynne's adulterous affair in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter, Jewel's name is a symbol of the value his mother places on him. The favoritism that Addie showed him is responsible for the antagonism between him and Darl.