Oh, my. There’s a lot of “animal magnetism” in this tale, isn’t there. Not only the characters’ hypnotic behavior and/or sexual energies—the traditional definitions of this term—but also in a basic animal sense. When Cash floats the term in his list, one suspects he’s misusing, distorting, the phrase (in tension with the order suggested by a list):

8. Animal Magnetism.

9. The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel. (83)

On one level, I read this to mean that, according to some folklore wisdom, a magnetic energy attributed to the dead (to the soul, the body?) pulls on the wood of a coffin. However, one easily (reluctantly) associates with the literal fact that the animals will come digging, come to test the coffin, much like the vultures arrive out of the sky. And this hungry world will also test those involved in the burial. For these characters, when Ma dies “the stress” really does “come slanting” in all sort of bizarre and unpredictable ways.

Many of them relate to animals, and what to make of these totem animals that run throughout the text and seem to embody the characters’ feelings? Consider Vardaman’s displacement, his association of his mother with a fish. He seems to connect the moment of her disappearance to the moment he chopped up the fish, as if her soul fled into its scales:

    It was not her [that died, one presumes], because it was laying right yonder in the dirt. And now it’s all chopped up. I chopped it up. It’s laying in the kitchen in a bleeding pan, waiting to be cooked and et. Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t. And tomorrow it will be et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there won’t be anything in the box and so she can breathe. (66-67)

At first glance, this logic seems false and disturbing, a sign and manifestation of grief, a response to trauma. But what’s also described here, I’d argue, is a logic of eternal transfer, a working theory of the afterlife, of rebirth. Should the family eat this messy fish, they will consume the mother, which somehow will allow her soul to recycle, so that it can “breathe.” Vardaman becomes obsessed with this fish. We later see him sitting by the rising river, trying to catch another fish as if, by dipping back into the inexhaustible supply of a species (as opposed to the uniqueness of a human individual), he could reclaim his mother.

Meanwhile, Darl spots the vultures in the sky on their return to the farm and says, “It’s not your horse that’s dead, Jewel” (94). On a basic level, he’s announcing his mother’s death (in a backhanded way), while reminding Jewel, needling him, about his misplaced affection. The suggestion is that Jewel loves and honors his horse more than his mother, that her special affection goes unrequited (though we, the reader, might understand otherwise). But the passage becomes more magnetic as he narrates:

I cannot love my mother because I have no mother. Jewel’s mother is a horse.

Motionless, the tall buzzards hang in soaring circles, the clouds giving them an illusion of retrograde.

Motionless, wooden-backed, wooden-faced, he shapes the horse in a rigid stoop like a hawk, hook-winged. They are waiting for us, ready for the moving of it, waiting for him. He enters the stall and waits until it kicks at him so that he can slip past and mount on the trough and pause … (95)

What’s striking about this passage is the general animal confusion, all varieties coming together like iron filings.  In “Jewel’s mother is a horse,” we again might read that Jewel is viscerally connected to his animal charge. But the “they” who are waiting are not only the family, but also the vultures above, who will follow their journey on the awful scent (a true animal magnetism). The “it” being moved is the coffin, but also the soul itself, or simply the flesh, in the vulture’s gullet: Here we might think of the ecological cycle, the scattering of matter. The vultures are waiting for “him” in particular, for Jewel. All of this leads me (recycles me) back to Darl’s initial assertion: “I cannot love my mother because I have no mother.” On the one hand, this is fact: He is lately motherless, and these words are filled with deadpan despair. On the other hand, one detects a deeper, calmer philosophy, almost Zen, in Darl: He has no mother because everything, since it partakes in this cycle, is his mother. In which case, Jewel’s mother truly is a horse.

Hoping to add a little more to this post later, but that’s all for now. Watch out for them animals.

–Nick

On page 56, in a section narrated by Vardaman, there is a paragraph that I consider some of the finest writing I’ve come across by Faulkner:

It is dark. I can hear wood, silence: I know them. But not living sounds, not even him. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components — snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is.

This paragraph stands out to me as all-important within the context of the larger scope of AILD. Each of the characters in the novel has a distinct outlook on things, a unique perspective and individual philosophy. Whereas with TSAF each voice was so different in an almost violent way, clashing with each other and standing in sharp contrast, the voices of AILD blend together in a kind of musical harmony. They are the scattered components of Faulkner’s whole, like spokes on a wheel. In the same way that a body is really a conglomeration of parts working together as a whole, Faulkner’s complex and richly-layered literary voice is best expressed by the first-person inner monologue of the entire Bundren family and some of their neighbors. As a result there are no minor characters. Faulkner understands that each voice is just as important as the next; to have Vardaman or Tull or Peabody come into a scene, say a few words and leave, as they would in a traditional novel, is to lose that character’s real significance. We don’t get to see things from their point of view. With this technique Faulkner takes what he started in TSAF and expands it onto a larger canvas.

Faulkner deconstructs the image of Cash on a horse into its components: its sounds and its smells, the things that come alive in the darkness, when our vision is lost and our other senses are amplified. In the same way that Derrida concluded that language was an “endless signifying chain” which sheds light on the void, the absence, the space between words that are filled with meaning and implication, Faulkner writes in a way that brings these absences to life. What isn’t becomes as powerful as what it is; in fact, the two are on an equal playing field. Cash is still there, trotting ahead on a horse, even though he is not “there” in the sense that Vardaman can see him. Addie is just as “alive” in the minds of her family after she is dead, in fact even more so. I think it is this substance, this presence of some intangible thing that occupies space in our minds, that Faulkner is after. It is not the body, the flesh (as D. H. Lawrence might argue) that matters most, but the space created in our minds by another person’s existence. In this way we live inside each other, and that connection is ultimately more decisive than the physical space or dialogue we may share. As a result, life and death become abstract concepts whose meanings begin to blur.

The best that Vardaman can do is distinguish “an is different from my is” which, although he is the youngest of the Bundren children, has all the profound simplicity of Descartes’ famous declaration, Cogito, ergo sum. Faulkner recognizes that every human being, no matter how old or how intelligent, is capable of the most profound thoughts, and it gives this novel in particular an equality of voice.

Dewey Dell’s unborn child dwells within her “little tub of guts” as an ominous and ever present reminder of the novel’s bleak stance on femininity; the fetus inside her reduced to an organic and vile mush (itself a “tub of guts”), a living and persistent anathema whose perceived usurpation contradicts with the more blithe experience of pregnancy (58).  Addie’s death and Dewey Dell’s child are meant to contrast, but, rather than a natural course of events in circular progeny (an elder’s death being replaced by a new birth), the child becomes a crux, one which Dewey Dell believes must be excised—her unspoken plea to the doctor, Peabody, thinking he could “do so much for [her] if he just would…He could do everything for [her]” (58).  Everything, obviously, meaning an abortion to rid herself of the child.

Not surprisingly, a majority of Dewey Dell’s inner thoughts are quite morbid.  As quoted earlier, when on the porch with Peabody, she makes the particularly morose observation that “He is a big tub of guts and I am a little tub of guts” (58).  Not even Darl’s pernicious obsession with pointing out the buzzard to Jewel compares with Dewey Dell’s grotesque thoughts.  In a strikingly poetic and perturbing rumination, as the Bundren family passes the symbolic “New Hope,” Faulkner’s leitmotif of time once again appears, twined with the concept of childbirth as a harrowing ordeal.  Dewey Dell muses, “That’s what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events” (121).  The word “womb” calls attention to Dewey Dell’s general pregnancy, but the “despair of spreading bones”, and the “girdle” revealing “entrails of events” expresses a deep neurosis.  The actual act of birth, its spreading, tearing, and hemorrhaging, its physical and mental excruciation, rather than the birth of a child, becomes Dewey Dell’s focus.

But the unborn child is not the only exterior force pushing Dewey Dell to motherhood.  Although she had been taking care of the Bundren family as, well, her mother lay dying, with Addie’s passing, Dewey Dell becomes the matriarch of the family, and after a brief mourning (“she flings herself across Addie Bundren’s knees, clutching her, shaking her with the furious strength of the young before sprawling suddenly across the handful of rotten bones that Addie Bundren left”), she is told she must “better get supper on” (49-50).  Her motherly duties have begun even before she becomes a mother.

Dewey Dell often remarks on feeling “nude,” or “naked,” particularly to the air and the wind.  I believe this is also essential in Dewey Dell’s plight, as it is often linked to “death.”  As she tends to the cow in the barn, images of the pastoral run through her mind, tainted with the macabre: “The dead air shapes the dead earth in the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth.  It lies dead and warm upon me, touching me naked through my clothes” (63-4).  The repetitive use of “death” and dark imagery, coupled with Dewey Dell’s feeling “naked” and bare, suggest a feeling of morbidity with her own body.  The frequent desire for “death”—either her own death, or the death of her unborn child through abortion—becomes an almost comforting concept for Dewey Dell; the constant feeling of being naked, sensing, being alive, in contrast with the more “wooden” male members of her family (the boys are frequently described as having “oaken” or “wooded” eyes), and, of course, the “wooden” box that holds her mothers remains.

An old teacher once offered an interesting insight about the difference between people and animals: where animals use signs to communicate, language frees human beings to communicate directly. And indeed, as I sit down to write this blog post my cat is clawing at a stack of books on the dresser, which is how he communicates to me that he’d like me to open the bedroom door so that he can go eat/use his box. The distinction we presume to exist between man and animal receives a thought-provoking interrogation in AILD, written at a moment when modernism, aided by Darwinism, was using language to reassert the animal origins of man. The result is a book that, in pursuit of a kind of animal truth, is told through signs and symbols and a cacophony of perspectives that together resemble an animal groan.

The animal-human connection is most apparent as humans are compared to animals, and vice-versa: Peabody says, memorably, that Pa — perhaps the most animal of our human characters — resembles a “dipped rooster”; earlier, Darl says Pa’s face “stubble gives his lower face that appearance that old dogs have.” (17) Christopher T. White points out, meanwhile, that animals are given human characteristics: a buzzard is an “old bald-headed man,” (119) and a horse later crossing the river moans and groans “like a natural man.” (155) All this leading up to the novel’s most famous line, narrated by Vardaman: “My mother is a fish.” (84)

But most interesting is what Faulkner’s recognition of the human-animal continuum means for the story more generally, and language in particular. Faulkner seems to be use the human-animal continuum to vent a frustration with language’s inability to fully describe human experience. As Edmund Burke writes in “The Cries of Animals”: “It might seem that these modulations of sound [i.e., animal noises] carry some connexion with the nature of the things they represent, and are not merely arbitrary; because the natural cries of all animals, even of those animals with whom we have not been acquainted, never fail to make themselves sufficiently understood; this cannot be said of language.” What Burke is saying, in effect, is that what distinguishes man from animal man’s ability to refer directly to that which he’s crying about — a faculty that Faulkner notably withholds from many of his characters (excluding the eloquent Darl and Peabody): indeed, Burke’s above quote resonated deeply with Darl’s description of Pa leaning “above the bed in the twilight, his humped silhouette partaking of that owl-like quality of awry-feathered, disgruntled outrage within which lurks a wisdom too profound or too inert for even thought.” (49)

Some of my classmates have noted that the story is being told primarily through images and metaphors — i.e., nothing happens in the chapter except two characters walk through a field, but the way it is told in such a way as to give it a symbolic resonance — which we might view as an attempt to transmogrify tragedy into symbol, and in doing so to express from a sense deeper than language the true scope of the tragedy. Faulkner’s use of symbol forces us to assume there is a natural wisdom to the world of this story that cannot directly be related using human language.

Which is not to say that he doesn’t try. The story’s 16 perspectives, which contain within them even more perspectives, create a cacophony that itself blends with a variety of animal noises (horses moaning like men, cows moaning to be milked, etc.) and natural noises (portentous wind or silence, or pounding rain), creating for the reader an experience of hearing a long and multi-layered groan more animal than human.

Darl’s character is not as much an actor in this story as an observer. Aside from contemplating the nature of his own existence, Darl preferences what everyone else is doing during his narration rather than focusing on himself, even if he is not present for the events he is discussing. For instance, when Jewel and Darl go to town while their mother is dying, Darl provides a detailed account of what is happening at home while they are away, and only dedicates three short, poetic paragraphs in the three pages worth of narration to his own situation (Faulkner 47-52). Furthermore, when Darl does refer back to his trip with Jewel in that chapter, he only describes Jewel’s response to the wagon tipping over and does not mention his own reaction at all: “Jewel’s hat drops limp about his neck, channeling water onto the soaked towsack tied about his shoulders as, ankle-deep in the running ditch, he pries with a slipping tow-by-four, with a piece of rotting log for fulcrum, at the axle” (Faulkner 52). The combination of his observational (rather than personal) narration style and his knowledge of what other people are doing even when he is not present gives Darl a sort of omniscient quality that the other narrators lack.

This omniscient quality is enhanced by the fact that Darl discusses the Bundren family as if they are not his own. He is the first narrator to speak in the story, and he suggests that a person called Addie Bundren is dying, but provides no indication that Addie Bundren is actually his mother. We don’t know Darl’s relationship to Addie Bundren until his third chapter narrating, when Darl analyzes why Jewel was always his mother’s favorite son (notably he discusses Jewel’s relationship with his mother – not his own – again focusing on other people rather than his own situation). Darl’s estrangement from his mother is particularly apparent because he refers to Addie Bundren by her first and last name, even as she is about to die: “Jewel, do you know that Addie Bundren is going to die? Addie Bundren is going to die?” (Faulkner 40). Somehow Darl knows his mother will die while he and Jewel are in town, yet he does not kiss her goodbye before leaving, he only stands in the doorway and looks at her. Cora Tull tells this portion of the story, and glorifies it as if Darl is performing some grand act of love, but in reality Darl does not even bid his mother a final farewell when he knows he will not see her again. He only looks at her from the doorway, maintaining a physical distance from his mother that reflects the emotional (or narrational)  distance indicated when he refers to her as Addie Bundren (Faulkner 24). When she finally does die, Darl announces it to Jewel (and to the reader) from his omniscient distance, stating “Jewel, she is dead, Jewel. Addie Bundren is dead” (Faulkner 52).

            Cora states in her second chapter: “folks say [Darl] is queer, lazy, pottering about the place no better than Anse” (Faulkner 24). Later, when the Bundren’s are trying to convince Tull to help them cross the river in spite of the flooded bridge, Tull asks Darl what he thinks and in lieu of a response, Darl just stares at him: “He is looking at me. He don’t say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk. I always says 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 doings outen his eyes” (Faulkner 125). Darl is depicted most bluntly as an observer in this chapter. His odd ability to get in the heads of others comes as close to an omniscient narrator as Faulkner comes in this novel, but only at the expense of revealing Darl’s own thoughts, feelings and actions much of the time.

I found the first eighty pages or so of As I Lay Dying haunted with images of emptiness. The most prominent of these is Cash’s sonorous sawing. The creation of a coffin, empty box, pierces through each narrative like a refrain, causing nearly all the narrators to meditate on the box and its emptiness — an emptiness which is devastating because of the cause of its future negation or filling, Addie’s body.

While Cash’s empty coffin is the prominent image throughout the early pages of the novel, Anse and Dewey both seem to focus in upon their own emptiness. While trying to order Vardaman to wash his hands Anse notes that, “I just cant seem to get no heart into anything, with this here weather sapping me, too” (38). The word “too” is important here, it indicates that the cause of Anse’s lack of heart lies outside the poor weather condition. Rather the weather is merely an addition to his current struggle. This lack of heart calls attention to Anse’s words to Vardaman. Without heart behind words he is merely expressing hollow sentiment, “wash your hands” no longer means anything as nothing is meant by it. Similarly, Dewey is unable to properly experience emotion. In the sexualized milking scene, Dewey thinks about her own emotional vacuousness, “I dont know whether I am worrying or not. Whether I can or not. I dont know whether I can cry or not. I dont know whether I have tried or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth” (64). Her final comparison of a seed parallels her earlier discussion of guts in its depiction of fullness, growth and the lack of space for a tree/child. Both Dewey and Anse serve as personifications of Cash’s coffin, they are shells without the proper emotional ‘guts.’ Dewey furthers this comparison in her contemplation of pregnancy — the possible future negation of her emptiness.

Distinct from Anse and Dewey, Vardaman experiences an emptiness that is externalized. After marching up to his father and Tull, Vardaman declaratively slumps the human-sized fish at their feet. He is ordered to clean it himself and Tull, the current narrator, likens the fish to Addie and Cash’s coffin saying “it was ashamed of being dead, like it was in a hurry to get back hid again” and describes Vardaman “toting it in both arms like a armfull of wood” (31). This image of the fish is developed as Vardaman’s distress over his mother’s life leaving her body is spatially located in the empty dirt space where the slaughtered fish has “disappeared.”

Finally, and more abstractly, I found Darl’s strange omniscience also play into Faulkner’s creation of empty space. We first get a sense of Darl’s narrative power when his point of view leaves Pa and Tull and describes Jewel’s struggle with the horse (12). The most intriguing use of this omniscience, however, is Faulkner’s choice to narrate Addie’s death through Darl. It is uncertain throughout the entire death scene whether these events took place exactly or if they have been reconstructed or fantasized by Darl. This creates a dissociation between knowledge and assumption and obfuscates any implicit hierarchy between the two. Instead of identifying with the scene, readers must wonder, how is Darl narrating this? Are the events factual? Does it even matter? These questions forced upon readers creates a distance (emptiness) between the page and the narrative. Readers must reassemble their own account of Addie’s death. To highlight this split, Darl narrates his logical acrobatics around the concept of what defines “is” and “was.” He comes to the conclusion that “if I am not emptied yet, I am is” (81).

Compared to The Sound and the Fury, I find As I Lay Dying to be a breath of fresh air.  The constant jump to different perspectives creates this wonderfully rich background that I feel at times was lost in our first novel.  I have a much better grasp on the Bundren family and its cast of characters.  However, I do find a number of similarities between the two families – one daughter whose plot centers on her sexuality, a young innocent son, and then the three boys – Darl, Jewel and Cash – who are all seemingly unhappy in their own way. 

Yet, I believe the most prominent similarity to me, lies in this theme of “masking” truth.  By this I mean an attempt on the Bundren family to create a more normal appearance to outsiders which possibly reflects the Compson family’s attempt to save their reputation.  This idea came alive for me when after Addie has died, Vardaman puts two holes in the coffin that actually bore into her face.  This image is grotesque and quite unsettling for the reader.  However, it is a detail that is easy to miss, in my opinion.  This moment happens so quickly and then it is gone, but it is so important.  We, as readers, are given this gross image and then told by Tull, “…they made her a veil out of a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face wouldn’t show” (88).  Clearly, they hide this “imperfection” by a veil to go along with the wedding dress that Addie is being buried in.  This literal masking seems to be a symbol for the need of the family to hide any of their own imperfections and to try and be a more traditional/ordinary family – which they are not.  Even the fact that Addie asks to buried in her wedding dress seems at first glance to be a rather romantic gesture towards her husband and family. However, as the novel progresses we discover that this marriage is really anything but that.  Anse is incessantly telling others that the reason for Jefferson is because it’s what Addie wanted, however we learn later that his motive is really quite the opposite – new teeth. 

Additionally, we have Dewey Dell who has been impregnated by Lafe. This, of course, is not known  by any other member of the Bundren family, except for Darl.  Her biggest concern is, “ ‘Are you going to tell pa are you going to kill him?’ “ (27).  As Dewey Dell explains, this conversation is without words, Darl just seems to know, just as he knows that Addie has died.  This obviously leads to her own desire to go to town that is separate from that of burying her mother. 

Then we have Darl, who if there is an objective, primary voice of the novel, it is his.  Darl seems to be the most concerned with his mother’s impending death. He resents Jewel for having to go to town and therefore, not being there when Addie does indeed die. Yet, even though we have this compassionate and possibly “favorite” son, we discover from Anse how people in town talk about him.  Anse explains while they’re in the wagon going to town, “Setting back there on the plank seat with Cash, with his dead ma laying in her coffin at his feet laughing. How many times I told him it’s doing such things as that that makes folks talk about him…” (105).  He goes on to explain how what people think of Darl is a reflection on Addie and even though Anse can handle the ridicule, it’s the women of the Bundren family Darl has to think about. 

It is difficult to solidify this theme of misrepresentation without having finished the novel yet, but I feel strongly that it will only continue to be present throughout the journey to Jefferson.  I find that as I continue I keep discovering more secrets or “baggage” of the Bundren family.  

Throughout the first half of the novel, there are repeated suggestions that Darl is an outcast, and the subject of rumor and ridicule among neighbors. While it is difficult to pin down just what is so strange about Darl from these early chapters, we can tell from his narration that he fits in the same kind of intellectualized, abstract, self-conscious mold as Quentin Compson. His extensive vocabulary and lyrical tone clearly set him apart from the other characters, though it may be his thoughtfulness in and of itself that is his defining trait.

On pages 70-71, Vernon Tull states, “Now and then a fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in the world; how it’s liable to strike anywhere, like lightning. I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow…” Here Tull subtly presents an intriguing dichotomy; thought and introspection on one hand, and faith in god on the other. After this brief moment of existential musing from Tull, he retreats to the certainty of religion: “For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it’s like a piece of machinery: it wont stand a whole lot of racking.” Tull’s skepticism and even hostility towards the very idea of contemplation functions as a critique of rural southern culture at large.

Later, on page 125, Tull revisits this idea, and provides more detail about the general perception of Darl. “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 doings outen his eyes.” These lines are immensely telling. The anxiety about thoughtfulness stems from a fear of what one might find if he or she looks inside. Darl’s aloof, head-in-the-clouds demeanor is off-putting precisely because it forces other to question their actions and worldview. The banal Christian platitudes that permeate so much of the novel are a kind of mask for these characters—by parroting religious sayings and abdicating responsibility for their own actions, they can avoid deep introspection and the possibly painful outcomes of it. Darl doesn’t even need to say anything or challenge tradition; his presence alone forces others to question their most basic attitudes.

Even the most objectively simple-minded characters, like Cora, possess insight and intuition. Yet anxiety about where such thoughts might lead causes them to reaffirm the dominant Christian ethos. As we learn more about the misdeeds of these characters, it is no surprise that they fear exposure. Yet if they existed in a more open culture that encouraged self-reflection, perhaps they wouldn’t be compelled to behave so poorly in the first place.

As any individual would, the reader looks for some type of stability, or constant, to latch onto in a chaotic world. Whether it is a theme or just a sound, the pattern of Benjy’s static moaning cannot be ignored, even when diving into the multiple perspectives of the Bundren family.Therefore, I claim that a character associated with a constant is partly heroic in the world of Faulkner, whether it is a static moaning, a feverish roar, or a perpetual sawing.

Just from the narrator’s description of Ben (note the more respectable sounding name than Benjy) in the last section of TSAF, one can infer by the objective description that Benjy is a Hero, “[…] who appeared to have been shaped of some substance whose particles would not or did not cohere to one another or to the frame which supported it […] (274). From the objective point of view, Benjy is likened to a circus animal, without discipline. But, if the reader looks carefully, his physiognomy is beyond the norm. Described as a mismatch of atoms, Faulkner magnifies Benjy’s gift as our exclusive messenger of truth in a world that appears to lack any of it. Through the past participle verbs of “will” and “do,” Faulkner clarifies Benjy’s role not just as the eyes into the dismantled Compson Family, but as the true sound of time personified. Just from those past participles, Faulkner intends to show us that Benjy is a courageous character who symbolizes the rebellion against the logic of his (and our own) time.

For Faulkner, memory can live on in the present as a disturbance. Therefore, the only constant, the only thing real, is the entropic echo of Benjy’s moan for Caddy and Quentin. Beginning and ending with his whimper, Faulkner hints that truth is embedded in Benjy’s perspective on time and life. Benjy is powerless, and in a sense,  so are the supposedly normal individuals in the novel. Even Dilsey reminds the reader, “ I seed de beginnin, en now i sees de endin” (297). Her words, drowned in tears, are of defeat. And so, it is Benjy who acts as the metaphor for Dilsey’s prophecy on the Compson family. Faulkner ends with the sound of our hero, who literally alarms the reader with “horror,” and an “unbelievable crescendo,” that time and its cousin–chaos– is the only order for Faulkner and the Compson family (321).

All read and said, I believe the constant “chuck.       chuck.      chuck. of the adze” by Cash alludes to a similar truth bemoaned by Benjy (AILD 5). Just as chaos and entropy are the setting for the disillusioned perspective of Jason, Quentin, and their mother, so are the backdrops for AILD. Built upon multiple perspectives, the novel is a chaotic read. To keep track of their opinions, intentions, and illusions, backed by the sound of Cash’s work toward entropy, one cannot help but argue that the character with the most sound will bear the most truth within Faulkner’s novels.

-Matthew Adler