As I lay dying Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

As I lay dying - Essay Example Darl is not only a deep thinker, but very observant youth.(Wagner 1973) He immediately emerges as a unique character with what might amount to clairvoyance . Early on the reader is aware of this when Darl describes his younger brother Jewel who is behind him. He is able to discern that: â€Å"Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides.’†(Faulkner 2000 p3) Be that as it may, Darl appears to be the sharper of the Bundrens and his philosophical nature may have confined him to a somewhat dreamy existence. While he says little, he is often times engaged in deep thought. It is indeed ironic that for a boy who has little to say, Darl conducts at least nineteen monologues throughout Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. ‘†What you want, Darl?† Dewey Dell said, not stopping the fan, speaking up quick, keeping even him from her. He didnt answer. He just stood and looked at his dying mother, his heart too full for words†. (Faulkner 2000 p 26). It is the fear of the power associated with Darl’s clairvoyance that ultimately accounts for his family’s decision to send him to a mental institution. Darl alienates himself from the community and others fear getting too close to him. The fear is grounded in their knowledge that he will learn some ugly, hidden truth. A truth they do not wish to share with others. It is ultimately this fear that drives his family to have him committed to an institution for the mentally impaired by the end of the novel. Darl’s detachment and estrangement from his family after his mother’s death is explained by Darl in the following passage: "It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs