Darl and the Depiction of Trauma in As I Lay Dying Jessica Werner-DeLong English 498 – Dr. Eurie Dahn As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, depicts the journey of the Bundren family on their quest to bury its matriarch in the nearby town of Jefferson. The second-oldest son, Darl, initially seems to be one of the sanest members of the characteristically selfish and dysfunctional family, due to his seemingly objective and literary descriptions of the events in his narrative sections. But Faulkner provides many clues throughout the novel, such as the townspeople’s reactions to his unnerving stares and strange behaviors, which suggest that Darl may not be as straightforward as he may seem, long before his apparent mental breakdown in the conclusion of the text. Faulkner also depicts Darl as a veteran, though the revelation of this information is not made explicit until one of the final sections of the novel, when Darl mentions a “little spy-glass he got in France at the war” (254). After he burns the barn containing his mother’s corpse, the central question of the text, for both the other characters and the readers, becomes, “Is Darl insane?” I argue that Faulkner does not depict the character as traditionally “insane,” but rather as a veteran who has significant untreated trauma from his experiences in World War I. Faulkner develops Darl’s character using various techniques throughout his sections of the novel, which are written in stream-of-consciousness-- an overreliance on facts, a lack of emotional language, and his alleged clairvoyant abilities all provide evidence for Darl’s traumatized mental state throughout the novel. An understanding of Faulkner’s depiction of Darl’s trauma is central to the novel as a whole, since the question of Darl’s insanity is at the heart of the text. Many texts written under the tradition of modernism in the 1920s and ‘30s focused on the aftermath of World War I, including As I Lay Dying, as, the effects of the Great War were unprecedented in history.. One such effect was the phenomenon of soldiers seeming to “bring the war back with them” after returning home. The condition was coined “shell-shock,” because it was initially believed to be directly caused by exposure to an exploding shell during the war, rather
Vols. 10 & 11
1
