As I Lay Dying

Fulfilling a promise they had made to their mother,

Addie, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman, in

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, journey across the

Mississippi countryside to bring her body to be buried in

Jefferson, alongside her immediate family.  Each one, in

turn, narrates the events of this excursion as they are

perceived.  Though all of the family members are going

through the same experiences, each one expresses what they

see and how they feel by exercising their individual powers

and limitations of language.  What each character says as

well as how he/she says it gives insight into that

character's underlying meanings.

Darl, for example, uses his linguistic skills to gain

power as narrator.  He possesses the ability to pick up on

things unsaid and to read other people's actions.  Dewey

Dell describes his intuitiveness when she says that "he said

he knew without the words, and I knew he knew because if he

had said he knew with words I would not have believed...and

that's why I can talk to him with knowing with hating with

because he knows" (27).  He uses his gift of realizing

things without them having to actually be told to him to

gain credibility with the reader.  Who would doubt a

narrator who possesses that type of adroitness?  Also, his

language is clear and reflective.  He uses similes and

metaphors and appears to have an acute awareness of spatial

relationships.  Darl's sophisticated perception and poetic

linguistics give him the means of reaching for and

maintaining his role as a competent observer and reporter. 

However, his position does create certain problems for his

siblings.

Tull describes Darl's "look" as being uncanny.

"He is looking at me.  He dont say

nothing; just looks at me with them

queer eyes of  hisn that makes folks

talk.  I always say it aint never

been what he done so much or said or

anything so much as how he looks at

you.  It's like he had got into the

inside of you, someway.  Like somehow

you was looking at yourself and your

doing outen his eyes."  (125)

It is the same penetrating gaze that gives Darl so much

power that makes the others around him so uncomfortable,

especially Dewey Dell.  She feels that his strange knowledge

of what has not been said is an invasion of her privacy. 

"The land runs out of Darl's eyes; they swim to pin points. 

They begin at my feet and rise along my body to my face, and

then my dress is gone:  I sit naked on the seat above the

unhurrying mules, above the travail" (121).  If Dewey Dell

interprets his "knowing" as crossing some personal boundary

that she created then that would explain her fantasizing

about killing Darl and why she reported his setting fire to

the barn.  In fact, everything about Dewey Dell is extremely

personal.  Whereas her brothers report what happened, she

tells how she feels about it.  She uses language not as a

means of describing but rather as expressing.

       "He could do so much for me if he just

          would.  He could do everything for me. 

          It's like everything in the world for

          me is inside a tub full of guts, so

          that you wonder how there can be any

          room in it for anything else very

          important.  He is a big tub of guts and

          I am a little tub of guts and if there

          is not any room for anything else

          important in a big tub of guts, how can

          it be room in a little tub of guts. 

          But I know it is there because God gave

          women a sign when something has happened

          bad."  (58)

She is not describing the sun as "poised like a bloody

egg upon a crest of thunderheads" (40) like Darl would or

explaining how to do something in a step by step manner like

Cash.  Dewey Dell is attempting to express her confusion and

her fears.  She is a young girl who became pregnant and

doesn't know what to do about it.  She knows  she can't tell

her family and she has no means of taking are of herself. 

Instead of using language to describe the world around her,

she uses it to show how she feels on the inside.  Language

is a personal thing to Dewey Dell and though she does not

possess Darl's polished quality of speaking, she

demonstrates its power as well as he does.

Cash, like Darl, uses language as a means of gaining

authority.  He begins the novel as not having any control

because Darl possessed the role of narrator.  His first

narration is in the form of a list.  The second and third

are not even complete thoughts because nobody takes him

seriously.  He has no power as a narrator; he is simply a

character.  It is not until Darl goes insane, losing his

role.  The weight of that role is then passed onto Cash who,

in his last two narrations, finally has the ability to tell

things as he sees them.  Language has importance to Cash in

of itself.  It gives him what he previously lacked - the

simple right to express what he thinks.

       "Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere

a right to say when a man is crazy and

when he aint.  Sometimes I think it aint

none of us pure crazy and aint none of

us pure sane until the balance of us

talks him that-a-way.  It's like it aint

so much what a fellow does, but it's like

the way the majority of folks is looking

at him when he does it."  (233)

Whereas language is a power to Darl, Dewey Dell, and

Cash, it is a limitation to their mother.  She feels that

words made up to describe certain experiences are inadequate

to the experiences themselves.  She says that "words dont

ever fit even what they are trying to say at" (171). 

Phrases like "motherhood" and "love" according to Addie, are

completely separate from what they actually mean; they are

simply tools.  How could the balding man wearing glasses who

spent hours staring at the alphabet to spell out the word

"pride" know that that's what a mother would feel when she's

watching her child act out the lead part in the school play? 

And how could that brilliant young woman just out of college

possibly understand the word "death."  It has no meaning to

her - it is only a term used to describe the transition from

living to nonliving.  Language is crucial to all of Addie's

children, except Jewel, to mark who they are but it is

experience that matters to their mother.

The power and limitation of language can be used to

explore different perspectives of the same events.  Although

Darl, Dewey Dell, Cash, and Addie all saw the same things,

they each use different methods of expressing them to

portray what is important.  The funcion of language is

different for each character but plays an equal part for

each.