Use Of Dark Humor In As I Lay Dying

During the 1920s, many novels came to the South after the South’s defeat during the Civil War. Southern Gothic is a genre prevalent in literature from the early 19th century to this day, characteristics of southern gothic include “the presence of irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation”(Bjerre). One of the novels that used southern gothic was William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. As I Lay Dying has a different perspective telling us the story of the Bundren family and their journey to Jefferson to bury their mother, Addie Bundren. While most characters focus on their thoughts around Addie, the second eldest son Darl Bundren is more aware of his surroundings.

Faulkner uses dark humor throughout the novel to show the family’s suffering, especially Darl’s, in a new way, "I just looked back at Darl, setting there laughing" (Faulkner 106). Darl is sitting in the wagon with his mother's coffin laughing, this emphasizes his ability to easily detach from a situation. Dark humor is used here to make Darl feel better about his circumstances. He seems to use dark humor a lot to cope with his problems and this is because of his military experience. On the family’s journey to bring Addie’s decaying body to Jefferson, the Bundrens are able to smell the dead corpse. After days of traveling with Addie Bundren's rotting corpse in the wooden coffin Cash made, Darl has a mental breakdown. He tries to burn the barn down where they have stopped for the night, "Then it topples forward, gaining momentum, revealing Jewel and the sparks raining on him too in engendering gusts, so that he appears to be enclosed in a thin nimbus of fire" (Faulkner 222). Darl is emotionless, which is why he so easily decides to burn down this barn and his own mother's body. The smell of a decomposing body might have triggered a flashback for Darl causing him to have a mental breakdown and want to burn the barn down. Darl is a war veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder. He pays more attention to his surroundings because that is what he had to do during the war,

The distance between the members of the Bundren Family, especially between Darl and Jewel, one of the Bundren children but has a different father. Darl is more worried about his rivalry with Jewel rather than his dead mother and trying to get her across the river, "It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between” (Faulkner 146). The distance between two people is compared to the steadiness of time. Darl and Jewel are complete opposites: Darl is emotionless, but he realized what he did to his mother while she is alive and dead. Jewel does not seem to express any emotion for his mother throughout much of the novel, narrating only a few chapters in the novel. Their constant disagreeing shows the hatred between the two brothers and the fact that they can’t argue after they bury their mother and return home shows their selfishness. At the end of the family's journey to Jefferson Darl was sent to an insane asylum in Jackson, his family thought he was mentally insane when in reality he was the only sane person. Anse his father had a big part in this and now Darl is all alone and has nobody to turn to for help. In Darl’s last chapter he is narrating between 1st and 3rd person to show his