As I Lay Dying Character Analysis

Destruction and anguish are a pair of words that describe the novel As I Lay Dying. We go on a journey with these characters and feel what they are going through. The use of the author's diction creates different characters and traits. Faulkner the author of As I Lay Dying gives each character a different personality with his unique style of writing, but one character, in particular, stands out. Darl, the second oldest son of Addie Bundren, is narrated very properly while everyone else is narrated in more of an improper tone. He is perceived as an omniscient character. He is all-knowing in almost every situation even when he is not near the events he may be stating. Darl is very out of the ordinary and it seems he is the catalyst of destruction

Darl brings to light how psychotic he is in section twenty-one as he quotes, “ I cannot love my mother because I have no mother” (89). His lack of emotion and empathy is the start of his destruction emotionally. Darl is the only character other than his father, Anse, to take his mother's passing very well. Homer B. Pettey has very fascinating thoughts on Darl’s state of mind, “Darl’s madness, then, is due to an inability to recognize his perceptions as a network of symbols that do not convey reality, but displace it and negate it. Darl’s modernist tragedy of being is also the dark, destructive comedy of representation and language” (27). Darl’s sense of reality is not real, he is living in a world where he believes he knows what is going on at times he is not even around. The Bundren family does not put into perspective how delusional Darl is until it is too

Darl, a deranged man that recently lost his mother is slowly becoming more destructive than ever. We began to know Darl at the beginning of the novel as an empath that was all-knowing, but we slowly watch him become mentally unstable and cause this family destruction in a time of need. His mental state throughout the novel is never too much to dwell on. All the other characters had things odd about them as well, but Darl never has any remorse for his actions. They were not taken seriously and he did not even feel anything from them. Nevertheless, Darl needs serious help and when he gets it he is already past his breaking point. He had rampaged through his already broken