Aim: To review for our exam on As I Lay Dying .

1. Aim: To review for our exam on As I Lay Dying.

2. As I Lay Dying • 15 Characters • 59 Internal Monologues • Stream of Consciousness • Depth of Interiority • Takes place in a fictional, Southern town

3. Themes • Identity & Voice • Language – Words as Insufficient, Stream of Consciousness, • Death & Decay • Womanhood • Poor, Southern Life

4. Displaced Mourning Addie’s children displace their grief over their mother onto other objects or distractions. These are their coping mechanisms.

5. Darl & Vardaman’s Conversation

6. Addie’s Children as the 5 parts of her being:

7. Darlas Different • Anse: “How many times I told him it’s doing such things as that that makes folks talk about him, I don’t know.” 105 • Dewey Dell: “I rose and took the knife from the streaming fish still hissing and I killed Darl.” 121 • Tull: “He is looking at me. He don’t say nothing; he just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk. I always see 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.” 125 • Darl: “And then I know that I knew. I knew that as plain on that day as I knew about Dewey Dell on that day.” 136

8. "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades." • A reference from Homer’s The Odyssey. As the title suggests, Odysseus goes on a long and arduous journey. • In the above reference, Odysseus has traveled to the Underworld and encounters Agamemnon, a soul he once knew who recounts his death to Odysseus. • In what ways does the line from The Odyssey refer to Faulkner’s novel?

9. River Crossing - River Styx • Based on Greek Mythology • The River Styx separates the world of the living from the world of the dead. • One had to cross the River Styx to reach life after death. • A ferryman, Charon, would help guide souls across the river.

10. Barn Burning • “And I saw something Dewey Dell told me not to tell nobody. It is not about pa and it is not about Cash and it is not about Jewel and it is not about Dewey Dell and it is not about me.” • Which cognitive technique is Vardaman using here that we’ve seen him use before? • What is Vardaman telling us? • “You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; How could you become new if you haven’t first become ashes?” – Friedrich Nietzsche • “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you…” Friedrich Nietzsche

11. Darl’s Madness • “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.” Carl Jung • Do you think Darl is facing his own soul? By focusing on Jewel, is he perhaps diverting his attention away from himself, or is he, in fact, confronting it? Provide evidence for your ideas. “She wants Him to hide her away from the sight of man.” Darl says. “Why does she want to hide her away from the sight of man, Darl?” “So she can lay down her life,” Darl says.

12. “Darl has gone to Jackson.” • What is the significance of Darl picking up where Vardaman’s chapter leaves off – 252-253? • Why does Darl’s narrative switch to the 3rd person POV? • Separation from reality, from self! • “Darl is our brother.” • Darl is speaking as all the Bundren children. In essence, Darl cannot be his own person without having the people around him who used to define who he is. – Addie, Jewel, etc. • Do you offer another theory about this line? • Cash says, “This world is not his world; this life his life.” 261. Can you define this world, this life?