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

And yet, there's something gently comic about the whole scene. Most readers find themselves smiling at the silent march across the field, at Jewel's abrupt passage through the cotton house "still staring straight ahead," and at Darl's comment that "Addie Bundren could not want... a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort." If you find yourself smiling at these points, take a moment to ask yourself why.

2. CORA

This section introduces you to the Tull family--Cora, her husband Vernon, and their daughters Kate and Eula--and it gives you your first glimpse of Addie Bundren. It also gives you, in Cora, a look at the unfelt, shallow piety that, you learn later, repulses Addie.

Though she is an object of humor, Cora has characteristics that can draw you to her. "So I saved out the eggs and baked yesterday," her monologue begins. She was baking, it turns out, in hopes of selling cakes to a lady in town. But the lady called off her party and Cora is stuck with her cakes.

Does the turn of events bother Cora? Her pride is hurt ("They turned out real well") and so is her pocketbook ("I could have used the money real well"). But Cora, being Cora, refuses to admit to any loss. The lady who made the order "ought to taken those cakes anyway," Cora's daughter Kate remarks--not once, but four times.

NOTE: CONFLICT BETWEEN COUNTRY AND TOWN A recurring theme throughout As I Lay Dying is the conflict between the hill people and those who live in towns, especially Jefferson, the county seat. The episode of the spurned cakes is the first instance of this conflict. "Those rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks cant," Kate tells her mother. You may want to write about this conflict later, so keep an eye out for signs of it as you read the novel.

Through it all, Cora uses her religion, never too convincingly, to comfort herself. "The Lord can see into the heart," she says. "If it is His will that some folks has different ideas of honesty from other folks, it is not my place to question His decree."

It's not until halfway through the section that we learn how almost sacrilegious Cora's self-pity is. She rises out of her concerns--petty to the reader, major to her--to take note of Addie for the first time. And you learn that she is sitting by the bedside of a woman whose dying is of less importance to her than her couple of dollars' worth of cakes.

Addie is not far from death. "Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks," Cora says. It's a painful, yet perfectly apt description--the sort of matter-of-fact simile you might expect a country woman to come up with.

Addie has been propped up so that she can look out the window at Cash building her coffin. Cora instinctively links her to her own concerns about the rejected cakes. "They turned out real nice," Cora says. "But not like the cakes Addie used to bake."

Cora's eye falls on the dirty pillow case, giving her a chance to mentally criticize Addie's daughter, who sits by the bed fanning her mother. (In later sections you will learn that the daughter's name is Dewey Dell, and that she is 17 years old.) In the next breath, Cora praises Addie's baking and makes a lame attempt to reassure everyone that "first thing we know [Addie will] be up and baking again." Cora's monologue ends with Darl's entrance into the house.

Take a moment to analyze the way Faulkner creates Cora. He puts the technique of the interior monologue to excellent use here, mixing spoken and unspoken thoughts with sometimes hilarious effect. To see how Faulkner uses this technique, go back over this section and read only those lines that were spoken aloud. The spoken thoughts leave you with no humor at all--just a mother and her daughters exchanging small talk at the bedside of a dying neighbor.

3. DARL

In this section, Faulkner gives you a second glimpse of the workings of Darl's remarkable mind. He exposes you to Jewel's violent nature and his ambivalence toward his horse, the one possession that sets him apart from the other Bundrens.

At the end of Cora's section, Darl walked toward the back of the house. Now, you see where he was heading--to the back porch for a drink from the water bucket.

Vernon Tull, Cora's husband, is sitting there with Anse Bundren, Darl's father. Anse asks, "Where's Jewel?" and Darl, savoring this "warmish-cool" water that he is drinking from a gourd, takes a long time answering.

The water sets off a chain of associations. It brings back memories of hot nights during Darl's childhood and the almost mystical experience of taking a drink, alone, under the starry sky. In one of the many poetic passages in the novel, Darl recalls "a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank."

His thoughts float naturally from the sensual pleasure of the water's taste to an early period of sexual awareness, when he would keep himself awake until the others had gone to sleep. Then "I could lie with my shirt-tail up,... feeling myself without touching myself, feeling the cool silence blowing upon my parts...."

NOTE: SEXUAL THEMES IN AS I LAY DYING Sexuality plays an important role in this book, as in most of Faulkner's works. This theme was alluded to in an early description of Jewel and in Cora's section. It will recur again and again in As I Lay Dying--as a source of tension between men and women, as an antidote to loneliness, and as a bid for immortality, by projecting oneself into the future through children and grandchildren. Some readers see sexuality here both as a source of temptation and sin, and as a force for the renewal of life.

Darl finishes drinking and makes an observation about the weather before finally answering Anse. Jewel, he says, is "down to the barn.... Harnessing the team."

But he knows that isn't true. A clairvoyant (someone who can see objects or actions removed from natural viewing), Darl can see Jewel "fooling with that horse." Study Darl's description of the violence Jewel inflicts upon the horse--violence that seems to be Jewel's way of expressing love. Darl reports Jewel cutting off the horse's wind supply with one hand and, with the other, stroking its neck. All the while Jewel curses the horse "with obscene ferocity." What kind of person is this?

NOTE: ALLUSION TO GREEK MYTH The horse is no ordinary animal, and Jewel's relation to it is rather special, too. Faulkner makes sure you know that with two fleeting references to ancient myth. As the horse stands on its hind legs, slashing at Jewel, "Jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings...." Suddenly, the horse has become Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology. Pegasus and his rider, Bellerophon, shared many adventures until Bellerophon tried to ride to the throne of the gods atop Mt. Olympus. Zeus, angered, caused Pegasus to throw Bellerophon to the ground. Crippled and blind, the humiliated Bellerophon wandered alone until he died.

In the next paragraph, Jewel mounts the horse and, together, the two become another mythological creature a centaur. (Centaurs--half men, half horses--were among the lesser gods in Greek myth.) On horseback, Jewel "flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in mid-air shaped to the horse."

These two references are fine examples of Faulkner's use of what the poet T. S. Eliot called "the mythical method." By evoking characters from Greek and biblical myth, Faulkner offers yardsticks against which you can measure his modern characters. In a sense, he is suggesting parallel narratives--stories that serve as backdrops to the one he is telling. Jewel is neither Bellerophon nor a centaur, exactly. Nor is he exactly Dionysus, as is suggested elsewhere in the novel. But you understand him better when you know how much like these mythical characters he is, and how much he and his actions differ from theirs, too.

Will Jewel risk the gods' wrath on his Pegasus? Will he prove to be a savage, coarse centaur? You may want to write a report on his relation to myth, so stay tuned.