The Human Condition In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying:
The Correlation Between Mortality and The Self
She is propped on the pillow, with her head raised so she can see
out the window, and we can hear him every time he takes up the
adze or the saw. If we were deaf we could almost watch her face
and hear him, see him. Her face is wasted away so that the bones
draw just under the skin in white lines. Her eyes are like iron
candle-sticks. But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and
grace is not upon her. (Faulkner 6)
Does death define the human condition? In William Faulkner’s literary
work As I Lay Dying, Faulkner attempts at answering this question. In the novel,
the characters show the vulnerability of the human condition in response to
death. Being that, in the novel, the purpose of life is to prepare for death. The
self worth of a life is therefore brought out by a person’s actions in response to
the death of a loved one. The two main characters that portray the vulnerability
of the human condition are: Addie Bundren through her influence on her friends
and family after her death, and Darl Bundren because of his deliberate lack of
care when it comes to the human condition. Their actions lead to the
interconnectedness of the actions caused by the individual, and the effects that
those actions have on their views about death and death’s relationship with the
living.
“I [Addie Bundren] could just remember how my father used to say that the
reason for living was to get ready to stay dead for a long time” (Faulkner 98).
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This statement made by Addie Bundren depicts Addie’s belief that death is the
purpose of life. This is also shown by her long-term illness and inevitable death
by bringing out her ‘true self’; her illness and death also force her family and
friends to act upon their views as an individual and question their human
condition. The human condition, in accordance to the novel, can be defined as
“The positive and negative aspects of existence as a human being, esp. the
inevitable events such as birth, childhood, adolescence, love, sex, reproduction,
aging, and death” (Dictionary.com). Addie Bundren learns to fully understand the
human condition through her stream-of-consciousness after her death. “Addie
Bundren is the one who enacts that reciprocal relationship with the greatest
awareness, treading the paths of life and death with a deliberate and brazen
simultaneity”(Kartiganer 368). Addie has these views of her life because she is
not attached to it. Her feelings of detachment from her life are depicted in a
magnitude of ways. Her feelings toward her husband, Anse, are indifferent and
are shown by her infidelity. Children disgust her even though she is a mother
and a former teacher, “ In the afternoon when school was out and the last one
had left with his dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the
hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them” (Faulkner 98). And, so
she gave up with her life and practiced the one thing that she enjoyed, preparing
for death. She does not become enlightened until after she has died, and
therefore, becomes more alive in death than she had been while she was living
(depicted by her multiple narratives after her death).
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“Her eyes objectify others and thereby make them self-consciously aware
of their own perceptions” (Pettey 30). Dying was her inevitable goal in life, which
makes her aware of the vulnerability of the human condition. Addie is witness, in
her coffin, to the actions of her family. Many members of the Bundren clan have
an ulterior motive for bringing Addie to Jefferson, including Addie. Anse wants to
get new teeth and a new wife; Jewel wants a horse; Dewey Dell wants and
abortion; and Addie wants to take “…revenge of the promise that she be buried
in Jefferson” This revenge that Addie is speaking of is against Anse, because
Anse is a stationary person who does not like to travel. However, Addie’s plan
renders itself ineffectual, because of Anse’s ulterior motive for going to Jefferson
(Kartiganer 372). These ulterior motives show the true human condition of the
Bundren clan, because of their lack of care when it comes to Addie’s death.
They are all, in their own ways, looking forward to her death and after Addie dies
show almost no remorse over their actions. The rest of the Bundren’s are in
contrast to Addie, according to Donald M. Kartiganer in his essay “Life and Death
in As I lay Dying”, “As a result she [Addie Bundren] becomes the central figure of
compromise in a novel of compromises, one feature of which is the terrible price
they exact”(Kartiganer 369). Addie is the key concept that is holding the family
together, even if it is for purely selfish reasons; the bundrens are all going on the
journey to Jefferson because of Addie. Addie Bundren is the most essential part
of the Bundren family, even in death, Addie is ultimately the Bundren who is the
essential force driving the rest of the Bundrens to come to terms with their human
condition when it comes to death.
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On the contrary, Darl has no care for the understanding of the self. Even
though he is still concerned with the meaning of time and its relation to life. “ If
you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would It would be nice if
you could just ravel out into time” (Faulkner 208). He questions the reality of his
life and feels no affection toward his family. “ How do our lives ravel out into the
no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old
compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes,
dead gestures of dolls” (Faulkner 207).
In Homer B. Pettey’s essay “Perception
and The Destruction of Being In As I Lay Dying”, Pettey describes Darl as having
conflictions with himself and his family. “Perception, time, and familial
relationships conspire to frustrate Darl ‘s understanding of his own existence”
(Pettey 34).
This conflict with the self shows us the unsympathetic side of Darl.
He does not care that Addie has died and finds riding in the wagon to bury his
mother humorous. Darl goes so far as comparing his mother to a horse, and
therefore, belittling her by making her no better than an animal used for hard
labor.
Darl in this novel is arguably the foil to Addie (i.e. the Anti-Addie).
According to Donald M. Kartiganer in his essay Life and Death In As I Lay Dying,
Having nothing of Eros, Darl has no neurotic need to exploit his
inherent masochism in aggressive pursuits. He functions out of a
perfect detachment that is the source of his exactingly objective
vision that registers the world as it is, divested of desire. His
narrative description of the death of Addie and the immediate
responses of the Bundrens to it has the power of a passion based
not on empathy but on its absence, on an indiscriminate wonder
that spreads evenly among the outraged mourners: from the
daughter keening across the lifeless body to the husband fumbling
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helplessly over the wrinkled quilt he cannot smooth over.
(Kartiganer 372-3)
In this case Darl is the Anti-Addie because he cannot show empathy toward the
living or the dead. Addie shows empathy by pitting the living. She feels
sympathy for the people who do not see life as the preparation for death. Darl
does not show sympathy even towards him self, and often wonders what the
definition of the self really is. Darl lives his life by using others because he does
not know himself.
…He [Darl] does not act with the violence of Addie Bundren
challenging death, but he is the supreme agent of violation in the
novel. He invades the people around him, not for sex but for
secrets, that private, interior world, the residue of inanimacy that
survives in life not as an intimation of immortality but of the death
we all harbor, seek to protect and to delay” (Kartiganer 373).
This ultimately leads to Darl’s insanity, because of the lack of normalness in the
Bundren family, excluding Addie. Darl cannot grasp the concept of normal and
therefore, cannot feel the concept of the human condition nor try to understand
its meaning. Hence, this is the reason why Darl is the Anti-Addie. Addie comes
to terms with the family that she has raised and her choices that she made. Darl
cannot come to terms with accepting his own reality and accepting that
everyone’s purpose of life is meant to be in preparation for his or her death. Darl
arguably is going against that notion for a good cause, to live life without
restraint. He has no care about his life, so he does not have the same worries or
cares as the other Bundren’s. “Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the
train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of
owls when he passed” (Faulkner 146). This scene is almost satirical in nature,
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depicting how vulnerable and predictable the human condition is. Darl is the
Anti-Addie because he is portraying that life does not always have to have
reason, even though Darl is ignoring his own human condition by doing so.
Addie in contrast, wanted her life to have reason and because of that want for
reason, Addie makes her family attempt to carry out her “reason for her life” by
bringing her to Jefferson. Because, Addie does not ignore her own human
condition her life is made even more real after her death and it can arguably be
said that she then had more meaning to her life in her death.
Addie and Darl do have one thing in common, both influence their familby
their views or lack their of about the human condition and even more specifically
death. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner takes on the task of answering the questions
about the human condition when it comes to death. Addie and Darl are the most
quintessential characters in the novel because of their own human conditions.
Darl chose to ignore his own human condition even after Addie forced her family
to come to terms with it. Death does define the human condition, because it
makes people see themselves as an individual and makes them come to terms
with their views on mortality.