Knowledge, and its precipitious effect on the individual stands as the major theme in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. We as readers beckon for it, as Faulkner slowly gives us bits and pieces of the nature of the Bundren family. Upon the knowledge of their mother’s death, motives arise, and conflicts go unresolved in the novel. Take the journey motif in stride, and one will find that truth is the greatest burden for the character and the reader.
Dewey Dell’s enlightenment along her journey reverses the reader’s idea of what life has to offer. The sign “new hope” ignites Dewey’s meditation on her role as a woman in the deep South. Written in italics to showcase a new and important thought, Faulkner alludes to the cyclical, and pointless nature of life that Dewey Dell believes true, “Thats 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). This dense statement takes the reader into the bowels of Dewey Dell and the paradoxical truth of existence as an origin of entropy. The feminine words “womb” and “girdle” underscore Dewey’s helpless position as a single and pregnant woman in the deep south of the early 1900s. Girdle and womb are nouns that signify foundation, or support, yet the image that follows are purely of chaos. This paradoxical language transforms the idea of life-giving as deathbearing. This difficult truth upends the reader’s idea of Dewey Dell’s apparently simple character. Her conflict in god, hope, and life shows that truth and knowledge are not always absolute, especially for the limited reader. We find a similar realization with the first monologue of her mother.
Rotting along the journey, Addie speaks to the reader in language that is purely entropic, yet, according to her logic, true. Through her meditation on life and her role as the giver of it, the reader gains insight into the absurdity of her duty and her meaning of life. She flips what the reader would perceive as the norm upside down. Sin is virtue. Virtue is sin. The only time Addie convinces herself good, or proud, is through the masochistic beatings of school children, the sinful birth of her bastard son Jewel, and her logic that proves words unstable. The idea of words merely as sounds with unstable meanings alludes fits her chaotic view on the world. For instance, she describes Anse and her first two children in a philosophical tone that conveys a sense of identity and therefore, pride, “[…] I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart[…] and that sin and love and fear are just sounds […]”(173). For Addie, the meaning of words, or anything that signifies truth is intangible and always changing. Just as her own death shifts the world about her, truth shifts as uneasily as a supposed finality–death. Addie’s proud tone in her description of the world conveys her own knowledge as disruptive and damaging not just for herself, but for those around her. Further, Addie’s mixed memories and desires in the middle of the book interrupts the orderly sequence of the novel. We are taken out of the consistent temporal order of the novel, and therefore, are a step closer to the knowledge of Addie as the most disruptive force in the book.
Just as Addie and Dewey use knowledge to legitimate their experience, we as the readers use a similar logic to conclude a truth of the novel : Addie perpetuates chaos. All the Bundrens use their mother’s dying wish as a means to an end. And yes, one can say they are they are their greatest burden. Yet, it all originates from one source, Addie Bundren.
