Reconstruction:As I Lay Dying

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As I Lay Dying opens with Darl as the point-of-view character. Early on, it is established that Darl can <distance>⁠DEF himself from even himself:

❝ Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own. ❞

The end of his chapter is marked by a <rythmic>⁠DEF <repetition>⁠DEF of the noise his brother Cash makes while building a coffin for their dying mother:

❝ Addie Bundren could not want a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the Chuck Chuck Chuck of the adze. ❞

His smaller brother Vardaman also shows in his chapters a certain <rythm> as he expresses himself using <enumerations>⁠DEF, here with the decomposition of a cow into its parts:

❝ It is dark. I can hear wood, silence: I know them. But not living sounds, not even him. It as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components—snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a co-ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve—legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames—and float upon the dark in fading solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none. I can see hearing coil toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shape—fetlock, hip, shoulder, and head; smell and sound. I am not afraid. “Cooked and et. Cooked and et.” ❞

In particular, Vardaman’s chapters show a recurring <familial <enumeration>>⁠DEF, where he mechanically lists family members. It is first introduced alongside a potential <transformation>⁠DEF of the mother Addie Bundren into each member of the family as Vardaman thinks of her as a fish getting eaten, in a nod to the decomposition of the cow:

❝ It was not her because it was laying right yonder in the dirt. And now it’s all chopped up. I chopped it up. It’s laying in the kitchen in the bleeding pan, waiting to be cooked and et. Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t. And tomorrow it will be cooked and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there won’t be anything in the box and so she can breathe. ❞

In a one-line Vardaman chapter, the <transformation> is virtually completed, as, through child logic, he arrives at the conclusion:

❝ My mother is a fish. ❞

While the family moves the coffin to town, Cash mentions several times its <balance>⁠DEF (which is quite ironic considering his background story includes him falling from a roof and breaking a leg), which will come into play later in the story:

❝ “It won’t balance. If you want it to tote and ride on a balance, we will have—” ❞

Toward the middle of the book, Addie Bundren has a monologue in her own chapter where she points out <arbitrary>⁠DEF words and names:

❝ Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a and I couldn’t think Anse, couldn’t remember Anse. It was not that I could think of myself as no longer unvirgin, because I was three now. And when I would think Cash and Darl that way until their names would die and solidify into a shape and then fade away, I would say, All right. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what they call them. […] hearing the dark voicelessness in which the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds, that are just 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. ❞

As the family nears town, Vardaman repeats his <familial <enumeration>>. In particular, he uses a new <phrasal <repetition>>⁠DEF of the form “X is my brother:”

❝ Darl and Jewel and Dewey Dell and I are walking up the hill behind the wagon. Jewel came back. He came up the road and got into the wagon. He was walking. Jewel hasn’t got a horse any more. Jewel is my brother. Cash is my brother. Cash has a broken leg. We fixed Cash’s leg so it doesn’t hurt. Cash is my brother. Jewel is my brother too, but he hasn’t got a broken leg. ❞

On a stop along the way, Vardaman sees something (presumably Darl trying to burn the coffin), and identifies Darl by omission when going through a <familial <enumeration>>:

❝ 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 not about Dewey Dell and it is not about me. ❞

Debating about Darl’s criminal act, Cash tries to <balance> what is right and what is wrong:

❝ Because Jewel is too hard on him. Of course it was Jewel’s horse was traded to get her that nigh to town, and in a sense it was the value of his horse Darl tried to burn up. But I thought more than once before we crossed the river and after, how it would be God’s blessing if He did take her outen our hands and get shut of her in some clean way, and it seemed to me that when Jewel worked so to get her outen the river, he was going against God in a way, and when Dal seen that it looked like one of us would have to do something, I can almost believe he done right in a way. But I don’t reckon nothing excuses setting fire to a man’s barn and endangering his stock and destroying his property. ❞

Cash’s <balancing> act <relativizes>⁠DEF Darl’s doings through the <distancing> of a man watching himself do “insane” things, which is ironically and precisely something Darl would literally do:

❝ Because there ain’t nothing justifies the deliberate destruction of what a man has built with his own sweat and stored the fruit of his sweat into. But I ain’t so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what ain’t. It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment. ❞

As a matter of fact, when Vardaman expresses a <phrasal <repetition>> involving Darl after the latter is arrested:

❝ He had to get on the train to go to Jackson. I have not been on the train, but Darl has been on the train. Darl. Darl is my brother. Darl, Darl ❞

the latter quote smoothly leads into a Darl chapter which starts with Darl <repeating> his own name, as if <distancing> himself from himself:

❝ 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. […] ❞

The latter chapter transition is <rythmic> (“Darl Darl Darl”), emphasizing a mode of expression that was common to both him and Vardaman since the start of the book. In fact, Darl himself begins to use a <phrasal <repetition>> that mimics Vardaman, achieving a <<relativized> <repetition>>⁠DEF of his own name, and thereby realizing Cash’s prophetic mention of “a man that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man:”

❝ Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams. “Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes” ❞

At the end of the last chapter, Cash expresses a <<relativized> <transformation>> of meaning when he says “this world is not his world; this life his life,” where “his” is the <explicit>⁠DEF <relativization> of “world” and “life:”

❝ Then we see it wasn’t the grip that made him look different; it was his face, and Jewel says, “He got them teeth.” It was a fact. It made him look a foot taller, kind of holding his head up, hangdog and proud too, and then we see her behind him, carrying the other grip—a kind of duck-shaped woman all dressed up, with them kind of hard-looking pop eyes like she was daring ere a man to say nothing. And then I see that the grip she was carrying was one of them little graphophones. It was for a fact, all shut up as pretty as a picture, and every time a new record would come from the mail order and us setting in the house in the winter, listening to it, I would think what a shame Darl couldn’t be to enjoy it too. But it is better so for him. This world is not his world; this life his life. ❞

This <explicitness> contrasts with the final line that follows, where Pa introduces the new “Mrs Bundren” to the family:

❝ “It’s Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell,” pa says, kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. “Meet Mrs Bundren,” he says. ❞

The <transformation> of the meaning of “Mrs Bundren” is <arbitrary> in that it is reminiscent of Addie Bundren’s own prophetic words: “like orphans to whom are pointed out in a crowd two faces and told, That is your father, your mother.” But here, it comes in the <rythm> of a <familial <enumeration>> and, unlike the <transformation> of Darl’s “world,” is insidiously non-<explicit>.