The Bundren Wagon: Narrative Strategy in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
1979; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/saf.1979.0005
ISSN2158-415X
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoTHE BUNDREN WAGON: NARRATIVE STRATEGY IN FAULKNER'S AS I LAY DYING Charlotte Goodman Skidmore College More numerous than its fifteen narrators or, indeed, than its fiftyseven sections, are the critical interpretations of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The novel has been viewed as comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy , epic, and mock-epic; and each of its main characters has been the subject of critical inquiry.1 However, as John K. Simon has noted, an approach to the novel which critics consistently have neglected is one which focuses on the things rather than the people in Faulkner's fictive world.2 One of the inanimate objects that plays a key role in As I Lay Dying is the Bundren family's ramshackle, creaky wagon. Mentioned some seventy-five times in the course of the novel, the wagon functions not simply as the realistic vehicle which transports the Bundrens toJefferson to bury Addie but also as a symbolic means of objectifying the death of Addie, the disintegration of Darl, and the transformation of Jewel. By following the wagon's progress to Jefferson, the reader becomes an active participant in the Bundrens' journey and a more perceptive interpreter of the events which occur. Wagons appear frequently in the rural world of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, not only in As I Lay Dying but in other works as well. Unlike the automobile, which Faulkner portrays with antipathy and derision,3 the wagon serves as a positive link to the romanticized past of people like the well-to-do Compsons and is an integral part of the lives of poor Southern country folk like the McEacherns and Armstids. Elaborate though it may be, the antiquated carriage pulled by matched geldings that old Bayard Sartoris favors before he is killed in his grandson's automobile in Sartoris is a kind of wagon; it is the old Compson carriage that takes Benjy on his daily outing in The Sound and the Fury; and a wagon that brings Lena Grove into town in Light in August. The latter wagon, belonging to Henry Armstid, is shattered by one of Flem Snopes's wild ponies in The Hamlet. Faulkner often invests his wagons with metaphoric significance, as in Light in August: "The wagon moves slowly, steadily, as if here within the sunny confines of the enormous land, it were outside of, beyond all time, all haste."4 The wagon here serves as a symbol of timelessness, a counterpoise to the hasty flights of both Lucus Burch from Lena Grove and Joe Christmas from his ineluctable destiny, flights that determine the dominant rhythm of the work. Again, towards the end of Light in Studies in American Fiction235 August, it is the wagon, or to be more exact, one of its constituent parts, that Faulkner employs as a figurative trope when he compares the movement of Gail Hightower's mind through his past to the turning of a wheel: "Thinking begins to slow now. It slows like a wheel beginning to run in sand" (p. 462). While the wagon serves important functions in a number of novels by Faulkner, in no novel is it so central to his design as it is in As I Lay Dying. Since this novel is about poor country folk and the journey they undertake, their wagon obviously serves a realistic purpose in the narrative . The Bundren family history began when Anse Bundren started courting Addie by regularly driving past the schoolhouse where she was employed as a teacher. In her soliloquy, Addie recalls: "He would pass the school house, the wagon creaking slow, his head turning slow to watch the door of the school house as the wagon passed, until he went on around the curve and out of sight."5 Shortly before her death, Addie requests that her dead body be carried to Jefferson in the Bundrens' own wagon rather than in that of a neighbor. Because Darl and Jewel are using the wagon to deliver a load of wood when Addie actually dies, the journey to Jefferson to bury her is delayed three days. Though Vernon TuIl, a kindly neighbor, offers to lend Anse his own team and wagon in order to expedite...
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