In the opening paragraph, his detailed physical description of Jewel and him walking on the path exhibits what we soon see is a strong faith that language makes memory, perception, and action real. (Lockyer 74)
She also notes that Darl is the character who speaks the most in the novel, thus showing his adherence to the value of language in his actions as well as his words. In doing so, she says, "he displays the omniscience, verbal range, and responsibility for interpretation that we associate with a narrator" (Lockyer 74). What Darl says also solidifies the view that Addie has been isolated and has also been deceived by her former faith in words. Faulkner develops a range of views of language and its use and of the degree to which different characters express their own relationship with language.
Lockyer discusses this further and cites Mikhail Bakhtin on the novel to the effect that "the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language" (Bakhtin 294), an idea that infuses as I Lay Dying. Lockyer notes that Cash is the only character able to accommodate the idea of the other in language:
The novel, according to Bakhtin, is the ultimate recognition of language as always contingent upon context and thus never absolute nor static. His theory offers a way to read the subtext of as I Lay Dying. The novel moves, always in the shadow of Addie's words, to seek connections among its fifteen separate narrators. (Lockyer 75)
Those connections are made on the basis of ideas of time, of language, of the relationship to the mother, and of the power of the mother as a female force in the world.
Daniel J. Singal considers this issue as he compares Caddy in the Sound and the Fury and Addie in as I Lay Dying as well as several other women in different works by Faulkner and notes how "all the characters, in one form or another, take on maternal roles toward boys or young men" (Singal 77) and that Faulkner repeats the disyllable "addie" in many of the names. Singal concludes that these characters all represent "Faulkner's small, dark-haired, and fiercely proud mother, who, Richard Gray informs us, 'haunted the novelist just as his great-grandfather did' and whom he addressed during his youth...
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