Within the very first pages of As I Lay Dying Cora provides readers with some initial foreshadowing of the novel’s exploration of liminality, which can be defined here as existing before or throughout a threshold or transitional stage. As she reflects on Addie’s laying, dying, liminal state Cora notes that despite her deteriorating physicality Addie’s capacity to communicate prevails: “If we were deaf we could almost watch her face and hear him, see him” (8). Thus, in keeping with the old proverb, “The eyes are the windows to the soul,” Cora’s observation reflects the profound duality between the death of a body and the death of a mind; Addie’s nearly lifeless body in contrast with her still expressive face combine to form a unique threshold being. And indeed, when Addie does choose to communicate verbally, even from her deathbed, her voice is described as “strong, and unimpaired” (48).

Eyes are consistently the most symbolic organ throughout the novel. Faulkner uses the word seventy-six times over the course of his two-hundred and sixty page novel, on average once every three pages. Faulkner is not only interested in the eyes of his characters’, but also those of his horses, fish, owls, and sun; pale ones like Jewel’s, and those black as Dewey Dell’s. As Cora narrows in on Addie’s “windows to the soul” she notes, “Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks” (8). By relating the drowning phenomenon of a candle on the verge of burning out to Addie’s own fast-approaching extinguishment, Cora once again highlights the unique state of liminality; the fitful flickering, likened to the body’s final instinctual yearnings to stay alive, becomes less and less potent with each flare; Addie’s last breaths, a candle’s. And at the actual moment Addie crosses the threshold between life and death, Darl makes a similar observation: “…[H]er eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon them; the two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as if someone had leaned down and blown upon them” (48).

Cora and Darl’s descriptions hold additional symbolic significance in their foreshadowing of the trials Addie’s dead body will endure before finally being laid to rest–– trials reiterated by Cora when she quotes Addie’s blasphemy of worshiping Jewel in place of Christ: “‘He is my cross and he will be my salvation. He will save me from the water and from the fire’” (168). As previously mentioned, a guttering candle elicits the act of drowning; though already dead by the time her family attempts to cross the bridge, Jewel first saves Addie’s coffin from drowning in the river. And later, he saves it again from burning up in the fire Darl has set to it in the barn.

That Jewel feels compelled to continuously rescue Addie’s already dead body lends significance to the discussion of liminality in As I Lay Dying both because it reveals his dedication to fulfilling Addie’s transition from laying alive to laying dead, and also because it reflects the powerful force that can remain in a departed being. Returning to the distinction between death of the body versus death of the mind, then, we come across an interesting passage from Peabody when he first arrives at Addie’s deathbed: “…[W]hen I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind–and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement” (43-44). It is important that these words are delivered by a doctor, someone who, presumably, is more familiar with death, and has a stronger scientific background, than the average person in Yoknapatawpha Country because despite these details, Peabody still embodies a spiritual perspective on death. This is how he can suggest Addie has been dead ten days before he arrived; though a few more breaths of physical life remain in her, her will to live has passed, she has no more mind for life. Conversely, once she has both physically and spiritually passed on, Addie Bundren manages to live on in other people’s lives, strangers even: “…I imagined a lot of things coming up between us, but I be durn if I ever thought it would be a body four days dead and that a woman” (117-118).