Tension between Darl and Jewel

Addie Bundren, the enigmatic wife and mother in Faulkner's brilliantly innovative As I Lay Dying, lies dying long after her death. So powerful is her influence that her family sets out on and continues the burial journey to Jefferson despite encountering seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Not only is this journey physically difficult, but it is emotionally painful for the Bundrens as well. For Darl and Jewel, the emotional journey far outweighs the physical in significance. To Jewel, Addie's death means the loss of the one person in the world he truly loves. Grief and despair he manifests as violent action, and fulfilling his mother's dying wish to be buried in Jefferson is his only way of mourning. Though other family members also were to go to Jefferson at this time for various reasons, Jewel is the driving force behind the journey. Darl, on the other hand, becomes the journey's saboteur, in part because his detachment allows him to recognize the journey's ludicrous and painful qualities, and in part because his role as saboteur places him in direct opposition to Jewel. As I Lay Dying is fraught with tension, as one would expect in a novel whose chief action is a cooperative group effort performed under extremely adverse conditions by people who don't understand or like one another very much. The Bundrens, individually and collectively, are under tremendous strain from the moment the novel opens until the end of the journey ten days later. The tension in Darl and Jewel's relationship, however, is one of special significance. This relationship, crucial to the structure of the text, embodies the unresolvable ambiguities at the heart of the journey. In his discussion of narrative voice, Stephen Ross delineates what he terms the textual voice of As I Lay Dying: such features as italic type, variations in, or absence of, expected speaker identification, and unusual punctuation, spacing, or paragraphing "articulate a visual difference that signifies" ("Voice" 306-307). These and other features are signs that shape not only narrative voice but also narrative structure. Faulkner deliberately deviates from the conventions of standard English prose in order to create new codes to highlight the tension between Darl and Jewel. In fact, these textual features point with striking clarity to the relationship between Darl and Jewel as the narrative and structural hub of the text. Darl is the single most important character in As I Lay Dying. (1) Not only is he a major protagonist, but his nineteen monologues, nearly twice the number given any other single narrator, account for roughly one third of the text. Sensitive, articulate, and detached, Darl is the chief source of information about almost all personalities and relationships in the novel. (2) What interests Darl must, perforce, interest the reader, for so the text is constructed. And very early on we discover that the person who most interests Darl is his brother Jewel. Structural evidence from the text subtly but strongly attests to this fact. Darl's consistent identification of Jewel as "he," the unusual paragraphing and italics calling attention to Jewel, the focusing on Jewel at the beginning and ending of sections, and even the names Darl gives his mother and father indicate Darl's preoccupation with Jewel. Also significant is the leading role that Jewel plays in Darl's sections of the text: Jewel appears in every one of Darl's monologues. In four of the nineteen, Jewel is the central character, while fourteen of the remaining fifteen focus on Jewel at some point in the monologue. In particular, they focus on the bond between Addie and Jewel, (3) a concern largely responsible for the tension in the relationship between the two brothers. I It is no accident that the first word of As I Lay Dying is "Jewel". From the opening of the novel's first monologue, Darl centers his interest on this brother. Although their mother is dying, Darl does not even mention that fact until the close of the monologue, and then only obliquely ("Addie Bundren could not want a better . …