Character Analysis Of Darl In Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

There are many reasons to support whether or not Darl is sane or insane, however there are more to support the fact that he is indeed sane. In fact, Darl may be the only sane member of the Bundren family. Through Darl’s actions and internal monologues readers are able to come to the conclusion that he is sane. He is the only character in the book that seems to have many different levels of consciousness which allows him to interpret the feelings and hidden agendas of the other family members. Darl uses his omniscience to poetically analyze everyone and everything around him and to taunt other members of the family for his own pleasure. In As I Lay Dying Faulkner uses a series of internal monologues to express the effectiveness or the lack of

He started writing As I Lay Dying the day after the stock market crash of 1929. This story takes place in the southern part of the United States often referred to as “the south.” Faulkner was a poor man from the south. The south has consisted of poor farmers for years. The south has always had a strict moral code based on their beliefs. The poor people of the south generally were not very educated. Faulkner displays this in As I Lay Dying. The religion of the time was Christianity, more specifically Southern Baptist. They believed that sex was strictly for marriage. This is why Addie felt guilty for Jewel being from an affair and gave Anse two more children as she felt she owed him, but never told him the truth. Dewey Dell also gets pregnant without being married and is afraid of what her family will think of her, so she tries to secretly get an abortion before they find out. Abortions are also not accepted by society at this time. The economic standing of the southern farmers and religious views of the time play a part in Faulkner’s writing of this story. The modern film adaption of As I lay Dying by James Franco takes on the many challenges that making a movie on this unique novel brings. First of all, the story has no real narrator. There are 15 different narrators. This presents a difficult challenge in bringing a text to life. At times in the movie there is a split screen to represent the different viewpoints of the

Sean K. Kelly in his article states that Walter Slatoff says "finished work becomes, in a sense, the record of a process, the record of the artist's struggle with his materials, rather than a record of his victory over materials." This is exactly what As I Lay Dying is. One of, if not the best example of this struggle with an artist’s medium is on page 88. Faulkner actually inserts a picture of a coffin to show the clock shape. This shows the ineffectiveness of words, because without that picture most readers would be unable to accurately picture the coffin in their head by just reading “clock-shape.” Faulkner realizes this and decides to include this picture. This is a common theme and problem in all literature. William Rodney Allen says “The problems of the function of language is a theme common to modern writers: T. S. Eliot's devotion to concreteness in poetry and Ernest Hemingway's attacks on the emptiness of abstract terms come readily to mind.” An example of Faulkner using a character to display their own inability to express their thoughts is the shortest chapter of the novel narrated by Vardaman. This chapter consists of one sentence, “My mother is a fish” (84). Vardaman caught a fish earlier in the story and it died. In his eyes the fish was now “not-fish.” When his