Addie’s Bell Toll
By
Penelope Stickney
Dr. Rashidah Muhammad
Engl 850
December 7, 2000
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Addie’s Bell Toll
William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was first published in 1930. A unique style of
literature, it combines the voices and inner monologues of fifteen different speakers in
fifty-nine pieces of separate yet intertextual writing that overlaps and intertwines yet
never connects in common dialogue. Through these soliloquies and interpretations of
events the reader learns of the last days and life of the Bundren matriarch, Addie. Talked
about, observed, and reminisced, Addie is the central character of the novel who never
speaks--never shares her thoughts until about two-thirds into the book, long after she
dies. What is Faulkner’s intention in presenting the story in this format? Perhaps it is
through this subtle use of symbolism that Faulkner shows that although the Bundrens live
and work closely together, they never connect or truly communicate as a family. Even
though they report conversation and work side by side, their dysfunctional relationships
become the cause of Addie’s decision to lie down and die. And, as Faulkner weaves the
plot, he uses this arrangement as a frame for the Modern Existentialist theory that
individuals must choose to live their lives to the fullest, that relationships support the
fullness of living, and intimacy with others is necessary to life. As a philosophical
movement, existentialism emphasizes individual existence, freedom, and choice. For
Addie, the absence of relationships symbolically equates with death; therefore, her
decision to die is rational. She is and has always lived among the dead.
Addie’s life reflected: “the loneliness of the one in mourning is like the suffering of
one critically ill” (qtd. in Sproule). In this statement, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the
Father of Modern Existentialism, suggests that the depths of despair and loneliness
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(mental anguish) are as unmanageable and as unyielding as a terminal illness (physical
turmoil). There is no way out of the physical turmoil of an illness unto death; likewise,
mental anguish can be as debilitating. Therefore, as one is to the other, there is no escape
from either. Consequently, if true intense loneliness and unregenerate illness are one,
then Addie Bundren spent most of her life critically ill even though those around her
never sensed her anguish. Cora, a townswoman and the closest female friend that Addie
had, observes, “She lived, a lonely woman, lonely with her pride, trying to make folks
believe different, hiding the fact that they [Addie’s family] just suffered her,[…] hiding
her pride and her broken heart” (Faulkner 22-23).
For many years of her life, Addie struggled against despair. Placed in life as a
woman, Addie was robbed of her individuality and given few options. The simple fact
that she was born a woman placed her in a situation that did not allow individuality, and
Addie reveals that throughout her life she passionately desired to embrace something
more than her limited options. As a child she was controlled by the words of her father;
as a school teacher those words continued to haunt her and she took to beating the
children: “I would look forward to the times when [the school children] faulted, so I
could whip them” (170); as a wife she is subject to the emptiness of her relationship with
her husband: “Anse...had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words a
long time. I knew that that word was just like the others: just a shape to fill a lack“ (172);
and in mid-life she chose to give up and die. It is then she completes her life’s circle.
She lived her life to die, as her father instructed. “The reason for living was to get ready
to stay dead for a long time” (169).
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Trapped in a preordained existence, she searches for her individuality, the true essence
of self, and finds that the lifestyle that holds her and the words she believes to lack
meaning cannot control her. Choosing to find life, she creates her own meaning for life
and follows the path of her father as release from the nineteenth century social climate.
“Women...are subject to social influences that attempt to rob them of their awareness of
their own freedom, and they must overcome these constraints through courageous selfassertion,” taught Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), the great female existentialist
philosopher (Velesquez 262). In her work, The Second Sex, de Beauvoir argues that “in
our male-dominated society, men define women wholly in terms of men’s own nature: a
woman is simply ‘the other.’ The nonmale one who relates to the male. Women […] who
accept this role […] become mere things for men” (262). This was the environment
Addie chose to escape from, and she chose to leave it by dying. Tull, a neighbor,
reflects:
“She’s a-going.” […] “Her mind is set on it.”
It’s a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived
to be seventy and more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since
her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her […] and laid
down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. “You will have to
look out for pa the best you can,” she said. “I’m tired.” (30)
This piece foreshadowing Addie’s death reflects what de Beauvoir knew, and as
Addie was aware, that intense feelings should not be ignored; they need to be taken
seriously and life must be passionately lived in the present or the person is not truly alive.
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Life cannot be postponed. Kierkegaard taught, “Anguish reaches its full maturity when
the child becomes aware that he will be able to choose what he wants to do with his life”
(qtd. in “What“). He believed that each person is unique and that each person must find a
truth he is willing to live and die for; Addie chose her truth. When standing at her
deathbed, Doctor Peabody observed,
I can remember how when 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. The nihilists say it is the end; the
fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant
or family moving out of a single tenement or town. (Faulkner 43-44)
What her father taught her in life Addie expected to have in death. In her passion to
find purpose, she took the “leap of faith,” significant to Kierkegaard’s philosophy, and
followed her ancestors. But there is irony to her choice in dying: even in death she is
separated from the truth that she ignored in others and thought that she alone understood.
As a link toward understanding Addie and the family and friends introduced in the
novel, a study of existentialism will reveal steps toward the passion Addie earnestly
desired for her life and for those around her. This analysis is based on Kierkegaard’s
three “Stadia” or stages along life’s way. The first Stadia is the Aesthetic, the level of
existence where one becomes and remains chiefly a spectator. Included here are the
Epicurean Hedonists, those who remain chiefly interested in pursuing those that like to
follow the arts. The people in this primary category remain spectators to others creative
genius. As an example, Addie’s husband Anse steps forward. Interested in the young
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schoolteacher, he drives past “the school house three or four times before [Addie]
learns that he is driving four miles out of his way to do it” (170). As a potential suitor,
Anse finds it difficult to connect with Addie in any way other than that of an observer.
Therefore, he drives passed the schoolhouse to look at her until one day she speaks to
him.
And so I looked up that day and saw Anse standing there in his Sunday
clothes, turning his hat round and round in his hands, I said:
“If you’ve got any womanfolks, why in the world don’t they make you get
your hair cut?”
“I ain’t got none,” he said. Then he said suddenly, driving his eyes at me like
two hounds in a strange yard: “That’s what I come to see you about.”
“And make you hold your shoulders up,” I said. “You haven’t got any? But
you’ve got a house. […]” He just looked at me, turning the hat in his hands. “A
new house,” I said. “Are you going to get married?”
And he said again, holding his eyes to mine: “That’s what I come to see you
about.” (171)
Anse gambles that Addie as a young, single, intelligent woman is probably ready to
leave the life of the maiden schoolteacher for marriage. And although Addie may not
fully reflect the definition of “creative genius” in modern terms, she is, nevertheless, the
closest marriage-available person to that description in the county. To demonstrate
Addie’s intellectual distinction, Faulkner composes her soliloquy in a form different than
the others; it is poetic and intuitively philosophical. As an example of her poetics, Addie
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reflects: “[…] the words that are not deeds, that are just the gaps in people’s lacks,
coming down like the cries of the geese out of the wild darkness in the old terrible nights,
fumbling at the deeds like orphans to whom are pointed out in a crowd two faces and
told, That is your father, your mother” (174). Regarding the affair with Reverend
Whitfield later in her marriage, Addie’ description is metaphorical: “I would never again
see him coming swift and secret to me in the woods dressed in sin like a gallant garment
already blowing aside with the speed of his secret coming” (175). Anse may not be a true
epicurean hedonist according to the current interpretation of the phrase, but he watches
and pursues Addie, the talented intellectual.
Another aspect of his personality, Anse created within himself the illusion that he
cannot work. This character trait is further developed in the second leg of Kierkegaard’s
first Stadia as that of the Abstract Intellectual, whose head is in the clouds but remains
divorced from the details of human existence that get down and dirty. Kierkegaard
observed about the culture of his day, "Let others complain that our age is wicked. I
complain that it is paltry. It lacks passion” (qtd. in Sproule). This lament refers to those
who pass their time on the sidelines, who remain personally and existentially uninvolved
with the great cares of human existence. Not only unconcerned about life and those
around him, Faulkner presents Anse “as almost subhuman in his inability to sweat and
suffer” (Cox 1). Having always lived in Mississippi, Anse understands the dripping
humidity of the seasons but is so convinced that he will die if he sweats that his children
and his neighbors do his work for him. “[Anse] is long armed, even if he is spindling.
Except for the lack of sweat. You could tell [the shirt] ain’t been else’s but Anse’s that
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way without no mistake” (Faulkner 32).
What is amazing is that his manipulation of others to accomplish his work is common
knowledge, even though Anse himself doesn’t appear to realize that he is doing anything
unusual or that his attitude toward the physical labor necessary for life is inconveniencing
his neighbors. Cora’s husband Tull acknowledges this when Anse is determined to bury
Addie in her family town of Jefferson. Tull says of Anse, “It’s like a man that’s let
everything slide all his life to get on something that will make the most trouble for
everyone he knows” (89). Anse’s impervious attitude and actions prove that he can
transcend his environment and the work will still be completed; he is so uninvolved with
work and with life that he impedes the lives of others who do his work for him--his
family and neighbors--who come to his aid without comment or complaint but recognize
that he is a “lazy man, a man that hates moving” (114). Even Jewel blindly says, “He
ain’t never been beholden to no man” (116).
Anse’s daughter, Dewey Dell, is another character lost to this first stage. She is
caught in the throes of the man’s world and absently gazes, seemingly unattached to the
events around her. “[…] and then I found that girl watching me. If her eyes had a been
pistols, I wouldn’t be talking now. I be dog if they didn’t blaze at me,” neighbor Samson
observes of Dewey Dell (115). Dewey Dell has her mother’s gift of language, but lacks
her mother’s guidance and teaching, so her gifts remain undeveloped. Even so, she
contributes this metaphor: “That’s what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and
despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events
[…]” (121). When she realizes she is pregnant, she reflects her poetic response, “I feel
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like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth” (64). But she has no gift of conversation with
others, and when in town, she is only a backwoods country girl to the sophisticated drug
store clerk, MacGowan. “Them country people. Half the time they don’t know what
they want, and the balance of the time they can’t tell it to you” (243). Dewey Dell had
been sent to the drug store by her boy friend Lafe to get something to induce an abortion,
and she ends up with a handful of sugar pills only after she takes “the rest of the
treatment […] in the cellar” with MacGowan (248). To reflect de Beauvoir, Dewey Dell
has become one of the “mere things for men.”
The second stage of existentialism Kierkegaard called “the Ethical Stage.” In this
level people live on the basis of conscience and are concerned with the values of good
and evil, with value and justice (Sproule), but lack a direct connection to the reality of
human existence and the passionate depth of its cravings. Those characters in this stage
include those helping, supporting, and observing the Bundrens. They are the neighbors
who visit Addie’s side at her deathbed and offer counsel and circumstantial observation;
they are the neighbors with information, advice, and lodging as the Bundren family
carries Addie’s body to her resting-place.
A single character, Cora emerges from these folks as one who tries to reach Addie’s
soul: “I said to her many a time…” (Faulkner 166). Cora is concerned with the values of
good and evil and may have understood something of the spiritual existence of
Kierkegaard’s third stage, but Addie’s relationship to life flirts with Friedrich Nietzsche’s
(1844-1900) pessimistic view that “the universe cares nothing for man and his values”
(Frost 74); therefore, Addie rejects the spiritual. Without repeating Nietzsche’s
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proclamation that “God is dead,” Addie rejects the entire Judeo-Christian moral tradition
in favor of her heroic pagan ideal, who she names to Cora as Jewel. At this, Cora broods,
[Y]ou’d think from the way she talked that she knew more about sin and
salvation than the Lord God Himself, than them who have strove and labored with
the sin in this human world. When the only sin she ever committed was being
partial to Jewel that never loved her and was its own punishment, […] I said,
“There is your sin. And your punishment too. Jewel is your punishment. But
where is your salvation? And life is short enough,” I said, “to win eternal grace
in. […]”
“I know,” she said. “I—“ Then she stopped, and I said,
“Know what?”
“Nothing,” she said. “He is my cross and he will be my salvation. He will
save me from the water and the fire. Even though I have laid down my life, he
will save me.”
“How do you know without you open your heart to Him and lift your voice in
His praise?” I said. Then I realized that she did not mean God, I realized that out
of the vanity of her heart she had spoken sacrilege. And I went down on my
knees right there. I begged her to kneel and open her heart and cast from it the
devil of vanity and cast herself upon the mercy of the Lord. But she wouldn’t.
She just sat there, lost in her vanity and her pride, that had closed her heart to God
and set that selfish mortal boy in His place. (Faulkner 167-168)
Addie lived her life indifferent to an incomprehensible world. She knew its beauty
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and sought its passions but found no return from others. She may have received the gift
of verbal observation at the knee of her father, as the words she uses near the spring
outside the school yard intertwine with memory of him and fervently reflects an artist’s
sensitivity toward life. Addie speaks: “In the afternoon when school was out […],
instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet […].
It would be quiet there then, with the water bubbling up and away and the sun slanting
quiet in the trees and the quiet smelling of the damp and rotting leaves and new earth;
especially in the early spring, […] (169).
Intermingled in the beauty of this description is direct frustration to the lessons she
learned from her father. “I 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. And when I would have to
look at [my students] day after day, each with his and her secret and selfish thought, and
blood strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to
stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me” (169-170). I believe her
father followed a form of existentialism suggested in the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905-1980):
The human reality does not exist first in order to act later, but for human
reality, to be is to act, and to cease to act is to cease to be….
Furthermore, …the act…must be defined by intention.[…] [I]t is the
intentional choice of the end which reveals the world, and the world is revealed as
this or that […] according to the world chosen. The end, illuminating the world is
a state of the world to be obtained and not yet existing. (Velasquez 261-262)
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For Addie, the end she was following was truly the end of her life and the overwhelming
power of an eternal death. In Sartre’s views there is no God, only existence, and if
existence is contingent on what is accomplished in life, then it is up to Addie to choose
to live in order to keep in that preparation for death. As an example to his quotation
above, Sartre considers the end as a good meal or the end of the road as a destination.
For Addie and her father, the end of the road is death, even though Addie believes that
she has always been surrounded by dead people. Therefore, her life is truly preparation
for death, even as her father taught her. Perhaps the characters that could have offered
her a reason to live were the school children she taught. However, the malicious act she
inflicts on them is tightly interwoven with the hatred she has for her father and is
probably a response to it. The children’s blood is shed and mingled with hers, creating a
symbolic picture of her childhood abuse.
I could remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to
get ready to stay dead a long time. And then I would have to look at them day
after day, each with his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to
each other and blood strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only
way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for ever having planted
me. I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them.
When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it
was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you
are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have
marked your blood with my own for ever and ever. (Faulkner 170)
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The children were saved from Addie because she chose to marry Anse and leave
teaching. But this scene and her verbalizing of it is critical to understanding Addie’s
character; it reveals not only her depth of despair, but also shadows the traumatic
relationship she experienced as a child with her father. Therefore, Addie can not
participate in the gift of salvation Cora offers her. Addie’s image of a father God had
been destroyed by the actions and philosophy of her father, so there could be no God. He
is dead. Listening to Cora’s reflection of Addie’s rejection of salvation forces Addie to
raise her voice as if from the dead and speak immediately of her father and the school
children. Cora’s story of Addie’s rejection of salvation raises the intensity of emotion
Addie had tried to suppress. Even though she is dead, she is now compelled to speak.
This juxtaposition of the two inner monologues is deliberate on Faulkner’s part, as he
uses them to point to the depth of despair Addie suffered and then frames Addie’s
thoughts with Whitfield’s soliloquy. Brother Whitfield was the adulterous father of
Addie’s Jewel, the son who literally saved her body from the flood. She could not
respond to Cora’s offer to be spiritually saved as the philosophy of her father kept her
from having an eternal relationship with the Father God. Also, the spiritual father of the
community had used her and as she recognized the sin, both of adultery (which she
justified by saying that Anse was already dead (173 and 174)) and the resulting lie, so she
could only trust her creation, her son Jewel. Here Addie becomes the Creator Father and
Jewel is the Savior Son.
Stage three of Kierkegaard’s journey is the religious stage of human existence, that of
the existential risk which must be taken in order to achieve passion--passion for God
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or according to Sartre, a passion for life with no regard to the future because only the
present truly exists. Kierkegaard words it this way: “’Truth is subjective’ in the way it is
bound with existence. Only that is ‘true’ which we have grasped by our own efforts
through commitment and making it part of our own nature” (Soren 2). When Addie
“took Anse” she was marrying someone who should enable her passion. He was, after
all, living and breathing, quite different than her other ‘”people. In Jefferson...They’re in
the cemetery.’ ’But your living kin,’ [Anse] said, ’They’ll be different.’ ’Will they?’ I
said. ’I don’t know. I never had any other kind’” (Faulkner 171). Taking Anse was
Addie’s existential leap into the unknown of a new relationship. His interest in marrying
her exposed that leap and Addie chose to experience the risk. After all, in her world,
“having a little property” and a “good, honest name” were prerequisites to survival. To
have life, Addie needed a husband.
But life did not begin for Addie simply because she married and took on the
responsibilities of a home and family. Rather, her life continued its bell toll.
So I took Anse. And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was
terrible and that this was the answer to it. That was when I learned that words are
no good; that words don’t ever fit even when they are trying to say at. When he
was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a
word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a
word for it or not. (171-172)
Although Cora encourages Addie to follow Christian teachings, Addie poetically
rationalizes her atheistic position. After all, she did have an affair with the Reverend and
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gave birth to his child. It is difficult to think of righteousness in the terms of the one who
is to represent righteousness when that one is the one who represents sin.
I would think of sin as I would think of the clothes we both wore in the world’s
face, of the circumspection necessary because he was he and I was I; the sin the
more utter and terrible since he was the instrument ordained by God who created
the sin, to sanctify that sin He had created. While I waited for him in the woods,
waiting for him before he saw me, I would think of him as dressed in sin. I would
think of him as thinking of me as dressed also in sin, he the more beautiful since
the garment which he had exchanged for sin was sanctified. I would think of the
sin as garments which we would remove in order to shape and coerce the terrible
blood to the forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air. (174-175)
Thus imagining herself unconscionable, Addie progressed toward Sartre’s view that
“since there is no God, there can be no one to conceive of a human nature. Without a
human nature, we are free to be what we choose.
[…] There are […] no norms of right behavior; we are on our own” (Velasquez 260).
With her secret guarded by Reverend Whitfield and a meaningless response toward life,
Addie lost sight of the conscience. She has no guilt because there is no sin. Therefore,
Addie’s only possible response to Cora’s pleas for her to turn toward God comes from
the philosophy of life she was raised with.
My father said that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead. I knew
at last what he meant and that he could not have known what he meant himself,
because a man cannot know anything about cleaning up the house afterward. And
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so I have cleaned up my house. […]
I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then I gave him Vardaman to
replace the child I robbed him of. And now he has three children that are his and
not mine. And then I could get ready to die.
One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was
blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just
a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too. (Faulkner 175-176)
Addie stopped finding ways of mingling her blood of life with others blood. Rather, she
believed that her life had reached the end of its purpose; those around her lost any sense
of meaning to her: “And then [Anse] died. He did not know he was dead” (174). Anse’s
words had become empty and meaningless: “just a shape to fill a lack” (172).
If Addie Bundren would have “open[ed] her heart to the Lord and receiv[ed] His
grace” (167) as Cora asked her to, she would have submitted to Kierkegaard’s Christian
philosophy of existentialism, but she could not do this. In spite of the negative influences
in her life, Addie was looking for the freedom to know her own passion, the passion she
could not find yet sought for in order to retain her freedom. If she submitted to the
eternal God she would have lost that freedom, as Sartre believed, because it is impossible
to follow and be subject to someone else without becoming an object. God is sovereign
and when acknowledged for his sovereignty, according to Sartre, humanity is lost. Sartre
is convinced that true freedom demands autonomy even from God and suggests that the
individual becomes a law unto himself, truly separate from others. Should an eternal God
exist and control, He restricts freedom so true freedom is lost. Therefore, for man to be
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truly free, God cannot exist.
Addie Bundren denounces God then discovers with Sartre that “Man is a useless
passion” (Sproule); there is nothing to live for, hope or dream for. When Addie
recognizes this she wills her own death, and when she finishes its preparation, she thinks
she has found her freedom. But her dying stare penetrates and her dead body refuses to
be buried. At the point of death, Doctor Peabody notes Addie’s gaze:
She looks at us. Only her eyes seem to move. It’s like they touch us, not with
light or sense, but like the stream from a hose touches you, the stream at the
instant of impact as dissociated from the nozzle as though it had never been
there. She does not look at Anse at all. She looks at me, then at [Vardaman].
(Faulkner 44)
On another level, it is interesting to consider that Tony Morrison speaks of the eternal
gaze of Faulkner as one who stares at the often devalued individuals in order to bring
their lies to our recognition and awareness (Denard 20). It is Faulkner’s gaze that takes
us past our ignorance and prejudice and opens up the world of the sometimes trivialized
individual and through that sincere, lingering, consideration exposes the connectedness of
their failures and shortcomings and unfulfilled expectations to us and to others. It is
Faulkner’s gaze that transports the isolated creature into the cosmic universe and links
him to us.
This is not what Addie sought in her life. This is not what Sartre sought in his life.
While Sartre and subsequently Addie long for isolation and freedom and autonomy,
Faulkner (and truly also Morrison) links the character as an individual to others through
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an unflinching gaze. Interesting to note that it is the gaze that most repelled Sartre. In
his play, No Exit, it is the gaze—that staring of people at each other--that is his
dehumanizing hell. Sartre’s final thought in No Exit is that “Hell is other people.” To
stare at someone, Sartre believed, bared him and reduced him to “objects” under scrutiny.
Morrison writes that Faulkner’s mythical gaze or stare gives credibility to the characters
so that they gain humanness rather than lose it (20). Sartre’s desire for “subjectivity”
reflects a common desire that each has to be a whole person and considered as such by
those others, without the need to be dominated or controlled. Therefore, his subjectivity
becomes isolationism. Faulkner’s gaze takes the isolated and reconnects him to the
others, still with autonomy.
Without the power of choice, the inability to make decisions, the individual is not
truly free. It is only when the person is independent and separates from those around him
that he can make decisions regarding his life. Certainly, as a female, this is what Addie
Bundren was seeking in her lifetime. She was looking for that autonomous existence that
was Sartre’s discussion and his perspective on life.
But here is the irony: although Addie lives her life in preparation for death, when she
does die, death is not easily hers. First, she receives the award of those spiritual elements
she refused in life: she is baptized in the river and is rescued by her savior, Jewel, who
also delivers her from the fire. She is surrounded by the family dead to her in life, and
whether they acknowledge it or not, they act as her angels and guide her on her journey
and protect her from the imminent vultures of sin. And Vardaman and Darl acknowledge
her restlessness. The victory she expected in death is not hers.
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[…] we can hear her inside the wood.
“Hear?” Darl says. “Put your ear close.”
I put my ear close and I can hear her. Only I cant tell what she is saying.
“What is she saying, Darl?” I say. “Who is she talking to?”
“She’s talking to God,” Darl says. “She is calling on Him to help her.”
“What does she want him to do?” I say.
“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.
“Why does she want to lay down her life, Darl?”
“Listen,” Darl says. We hear her. We hear her turn over on her side.
“Listen,” Darl says.
“She’s turned over,” I say. “She’s looking at me through the wood.”
“Yes,” Darl says.
“How can she see through the wood, Darl?”
“Come,” Darl says. “We must let her be quiet.” (Faulkner 214-215)
Although Addie may eventually find in death what she hoped for, fulfillment is
obstructed by her family and by the stares of the townspeople “Whatever Addie Bundren
may have been in life, however she may have been viewed by the members of her family,
each of whom ‘reads’ her differently, there is no discounting of her presence of her
decaying body in the coffin: just the opposite of being ineffable, ‘a word to fill a lack,’
her body is all too scandalously real to the offended passerby who smells it” (O’Donnell
Stickney 19
48). Addie lived her life to die, and she accomplished her will to death. But rather than
enter the eternal, she becomes the object of the dysfunctions of her family through an
“[…] ill-defined sense […] their sacrificial victim, [… and] they are the vultures who
feed on her corpse” (Fowler 7). Now Anse gets new teeth and a new wife; Dewey Dell
seeks an abortion and Vardamon hopes for a toy train. And, as Tull’s daughters observe,
Addie’s sons can seek wives. With Addie’s death the family members are free to go to
town, and having their needs met is more important to them than putting her into the
ground. Rather than resting with her kin in Jackson, she is victim to the stares of her
town’s people.
That is why As I Lay Dying suggests the Modern Existentialist philosophy. The
soliloquies are separate, internal stares—gazes—at the individual. They are a deep look
at the defeats, triumphs, and parts of the universal being, and “Faulkner’s refusal to look
away approach” becomes the imaginative “gaze that rivets us” (Denard 20). Because
Faulkner (and Morrison) does not turn away, neither can we as readers. We, too, are
required to gaze into the souls of these characters.
Sartre records that once when he was in a coffee shop he realized that patrons at a
table behind him were staring at him (Sproule). This moment he found to be extremely
dehumanizing, as does Addie, if she is truly aware of her fate. This is the rub. As an
individual, Addie wants autonomy. As a character, she must submit to Faulkner’s use of
the inner monologue and become part of the vision—that gaze that connects the past to
the future. “This gaze from the precipice is a vision high enough to see the broad
expanse and connectedness of history, and it is long and deep enough to elevate daily life
Stickney 20
to the level of epic” (20). The voices of the fifteen speakers weave a single story that
unfolds the epic drama of As I Lay Dying, and while the characters are not aware, our
gaze is fixed on them. Those who visit Addie and move about her in the last days of her
life hold her fast in their gaze and introduce us to Addie as the woman. Then she dies,
and even in death the gaze does not flinch. Here is where Addie continues her existence.
Stickney 21
Works Cited
Cox, Dianne Luce. “William Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’: A Critical and Textual
Study.” Dissertation: University of South Carolina; 0202. DIA, 42, no. 03A, (1980):
1148.
Denard, Carolyn. “Mythical Consciousness of Morrison and Faulkner.” Unflinching
Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-envisioned. Eds. Carol Kolmerten, et al. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi. 1997. 17-30.
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Random House, 1985.
Fowler, Doreen. “I want to go home”: Faulkner, Gender, and Death.” Faulkner and
Gender Eds. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 1994. 3-19.
Frost, Jr., S. E. Basic Teachings of the Great Philosophers. New York: Doubleday, 1962.
O’Donnell, Patrick. “Faulkner and Postmodernism.” The Cambridge Companion to
William Faulkner. Ed. Philip P. Weinstein. United Kingdom: Cambridge University
Press, 1997. 31-50.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto. 1999. 11 Sep.
2000. http://kirjasto.sci.fi/kierkega.htm
Sproule, R.C. “Kierkegaard.” The Consequences of Ideas: An Overview of Philosophy
with R.C. Sproule. Orlando: Ligonier Ministries, 1999.
Stickney 22
Works Cited
Velasquez, Manuel. Philosophy: A Text with Readings 5th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
Publishing Company, 1994.
“What is the Meaning of Life?” The Examined Life 26. video Pasadena CA: Intelecom,
1998.