One of the essential theme of As I Lay Dying and that sets the tone of the story is the constant feeling that the characters are lonely and out-of-place. I first thought about this when we saw the country vs. town motif, as the Bundrens stick out like a sore thumb when they go into town. Just looking at Moseley's description of the family as they are in Mottson shows how they must seem like bizarre country folks coming on a trip to the big city:
"It must have been like a piece of rotten cheese coming into an ant-hill, in that ramshackle wagon that Albert said folks were scared would fall into pieces before they could get it to town, with that homemade box and another fellow with a broken leg lying on a quilt on top of it, and the father and a little boy on the seat and the marshal trying to make them get out of town."
As I looked back though, it became more clear that the Bundrens weren't just country folks who were out of place in town, they are out of place even when they are at home in the country, judging by the way Tull, Cora, Samson, Armstid, and their wives talk about them. They don't understand Anse's determination to get to Jefferson (Rachel and Lula see it as an "outrage"), and their outside perspectives reveal to us how ridiculous the Bundrens are.
If I was only presented with these outside views of the Bundren family, I would be quick to say that the tone of the book is comedic, and it is poking fun at this eccentric, out-of-place family. However, the majority of the book is narrated by members of the Bundren family, which gives us their inside perspectives. Getting to know them individually reveals how they each have a reason to be isolated even within their own family, which makes them seem not just quirky and out-of-place, but alone, putting a darker spin on the tone of the story: As we get to know the family from the inside, we find out that Dewey Dell is the lone female, pregnant, and has no one to talk to. Vardaman is the youngest child by almost 10 years, disturbed by his mother's death, and is desperately in need of a parental figure to guide him, but no one fills that role for him. Jewel has a different father than all of the other children, and Darl has some form of omniscient powers/may be crazy. Even Cash seems isolated in a way, as he goes through a great amount of pain, but doesn't bother anyone with it.
Having both internal and external views of the Bundrens highlights the much-discussed issue in class: are the members of the Bundren family comically out of place in their surroundings or hopelessly alone even in the midst of their own family? Is this the story of an eccentric family making a spectacle while trying to bury their mother or a desperate every-man-for-himself struggle to solve individual problems? I honestly don't know. My best reasoning is that Faulkner juxtapositioned these many different perspectives to create a dark yet comedic tone for the book. My
reaction while reading most of this story was “I feel bad laughing” because the
characters were truly absurd, but the narrative structure of the book helped me
get inside their heads so it was evident how alone they all were.
Considering the novel As I Lay Dying to be comedic almost felt a little sadistic to me at first, as laughing at or taking pleasure in the Bundren family's very real misfortunes feels wrong. At the same time, it is their utter incompetence at even the most simple tasks that steers the novel towards the comedy side in the first place, and a lot of this can be attributed to Anse's incompetence as the leader of the family. While his constant grieving about his luck and desire to not be "beholden" to anyone can be seen as comedic at times, the severe ramifications that results from them, albeit indirectly, make the journey feel very dark.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! Learning about the internal lives of the characters makes the humorous scenes a little more painful, as it is harder to watch someone truly suffer if you really care about them.
ReplyDeleteI can really sympathize with your guilty laughter while reading this book. I frequently found myself enjoying speeches that were apparently nonsensical (My mother is a fish!) or strange, and then reading them again and realizing they were more sad than funny. I agree with you that Faulkner did this on purpose, to set the reader off a little bit and add additional importance to the varying perspectives. Rather than simply revealing secrets and biases, the tone of the novel itself seems to change with each chapter.
ReplyDeleteI agree! The outside perspective of the family is more comedic than the inside perspective. From the outside, the family and this stubborn journey into town seems so ridiculous, but from the inside, we see that it's more of one bad thing happening after another, which takes the comedic value out since it is much more personal.
ReplyDeletenice post, i definitely agree that there is a dark humor to this book! I feel like the multiple narrations from the different Bundrens is crucial for being empathetic and really understanding the characters and their journey. Because as readers we have a close connection with the characters, I also felt a bit guilty when i laughed at something in the novel.
ReplyDeleteYour comment of "I feel bad laughing" bears a sentiment I shared while reading the novel. Many of the events or ideas of the characters are comedic on their own. When they are placed into the larger context of the novel, they represent how the characters are alone and out of place. The example that sticks out to me is Vardaman and his trademark "My mother is a fish". At first, this thought is funny. The absurdity of thinking of a human as a fish is comedic and endearing when a young child thinks it. In the context of the novel, this thought loses its humor. Vardaman is a young child who does not yet have the emotional capacity to process his own mother's death. He has no one to turn to, so he adopts a different coping mechanism. This experience traumatizes him and ensures that his emotional health will never fully recover.
ReplyDeleteI totally understand the "I feel bad for laughing" thought, but at the same time if you take a step back and look at the story from an outside perspective it really is just a funny story. However, looking at it from the inside the tone becomes similar to what we saw in the film, with a little bit more seriousness and dark humor.
ReplyDeleteThe multiple perspectives really do add a lot of different tones to the story. Darl chapters tend to have the tone of an epic, while other characters such as Dewey Dell have darker-toned chapters, and then, as you mentioned, chapters written by non-Bundrens can have a sort of comedic tone of laughing at the out-of-place family. The fact that the novel can be an epic, comedy, and tragedy at the same time is one thing that I really liked about the book; the multiple perspectives really added a lot.
ReplyDeleteGreat Post! I agree that having only an external view of the group would make the novel more comedic. I felt that the Odyssey had more obvious comedic sections relating to the hardship of the crew because we didn't really know those characters. In this novel though, we get to see their perspectives which makes it harder to see the comedy in their hardships because we are worried for the characters' safety. But then we do get some outside perspective and some comedy, and nothing is truly set in stone.
ReplyDeleteI think the contrast between Bundren narration and outside perspectives definitely adds a lot to the story, especially what you mention about the conflicting comedic/tragic tone. It seems like if we only saw the Bundren's perspectives, it would be a lot easier to actually approach this as a heroic novel: imagine if we just heard from Anse, who very clearly sees himself as a noble, admirable person just trying to do the right thing for his family, it would probably seem heroic. But because we get these outside perspectives the pathetic and comedic aspects of the novel are more pronounced.
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