At the heart of Faulkner's As I Die is the question of communication. The characters' methods of communication are numerous and vary, in some cases, depending on the characters' relationships with each other. Verbal communication is brief and generally without particular meaning; the very value of words – the vehicle through which verbal communication travels – is called into question both explicitly and through Faulkner's nuanced semantic games. As a counterpoint to the potentially problematic mode of verbal communication, more esoteric and pure forms are postulated: Darl and Dewey Dell are capable of communicating notions and facts without words, in an approach close to telepathy; looks reveal an undiluted emotional truth, and characters are sometimes able, through gaze alone, to see very deeply those around them. The question becomes: how does the novel ultimately manage to reconcile these different modes of communication and what light does this reconciliation shed on words and communication in general, in the world? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Conversation is rarely used to express anything of substance in As I Lay Dying, instead it is relegated to the realm of the mundane and practical. When the local men gather on the Bundrens' porch on the day of Addie's funeral, they speak not of Addie's death or the futility of Anse's proposed trip to Jefferson, but of time and the fall of Cash : “You feel this time, don’t you? You?' Armstid says, "'A guy can slide fast on wet boards,' Quick says" (90). These jokes are meaningless and pointless, even to those who participate in them. Faulkner contrasts what is said aloud with alternative italicized text representative of what the speaker would have liked to express. Tull marvels – mentally – at Anse's folly in insisting on waiting for Darl and Jewel to return with Team Bundren and not borrowing Tull's and leaving for Jefferson a few days early, before the road does not get flooded: "[Addie] stayed there for three days in that box, waiting for Darl and Jewel...the third day they came back...and it was already too late...'Take my team, Anse .' “We’ll wait for ours.” She will want it that way” (92). It is as if there is a silently acknowledged understanding among the characters that such things should not be spoken aloud, for in doing so a misplaced sense of propriety would be violated; it is only appropriate to speak superficially about mundane and irrelevant topics. Alternatively, Darl is prone to frequent stimulating and abstract inner reflections, focusing heavily on questions of being. “I don’t know if I am or not,” he said. “Jewel knows he is, because he doesn't know he doesn't know whether he is or not” (80). (To fully understand its meaning, you may need to read these lines very carefully and/or more than once.) Darl uses the only tool at his disposal to narrate his thoughts: semantic expression. His ruminations become progressively more difficult to follow: he asserts that when one begins to fall asleep, one "empties" oneself of being. Darl concludes that because he is awake and has not emptied himself, “...I am is” (81). He says, “Yet the wagon exists, because when the wagon is here, Addie Bundren will no longer be” (80). The various formulations of the word "to be" that Darl uses here become so complicated and so fraught with meaning and double meaning that they cease to mean anything and becomeself-reflexive. Attention is focused as much on the transmutations of the verb as on its suggested meanings; one wonders if indeed the meanings are not so abstract that they no longer have any application or worldly referent. Faulkner uses Darl's penchant for metaphysical rumination to draw attention to the fragility of words: the form of being can only mean and suggest so much before collapsing completely. For this reason, Darl is unable to express his thoughts very lucidly; language is its limit. Addie Bundren, the matriarch of the Bundren family, has a deep distrust of words. She is offended by words such as “fear,” “motherhood,” “pride” – “I knew that fear had been invented by someone who had never been afraid” (172). The word itself has no meaning, it is superfluous: all words, even love, are "only a form to fill a lack... when the time comes, you would not need of a word for [love], no more than for pride or fear. » » (172). She knew Anse didn't really like her because he used that word. “Love” is a form to fill a gap: Anse lacked the true feeling, the real sensation that love meant, and so he used the word to try to cover it up; using the word is then, in fact, a mode of deception. Addie and her son Cash, her first child, didn't need to use that word – the feeling was meaningful enough. His ideas on the naming – the formulation – of feelings and their inherent insignificance are comparable to his understanding of the names of human beings: The name of Anse, of Cash or of Darl, once reflected for a time, melts and becomes a form, an empty vessel for the person it signifies – that vessel meaningless when separated from its referent, and therefore without inherent meaning. “It doesn’t matter what they call them,” Addie says (173). Samson, a man who is hosting the Bundrens for a night, thinks of a man he knows, MacCullum, but whose first name he cannot remember: “Damn, the name is right on the tip of my tongue” (113 ). This is a man with whom he has “exchanged from time to time for twelve years”, whom he has known “since a very young age” – “But it won't be okay if he can pronounce his name » (119). There is a disconnect between knowledge of the signified – a living, breathing human being in this case – and the signifier – the name of that human being: knowledge of the name does not necessarily indicate knowledge of the man, and of the at the same time we can know the man without knowing his name. The name is an abstraction, the concrete thing – its human referent – ​​is the object of value and meaning. Because the characters in As I Lay Dying are hostile to language and names (things used to communicate verbally in the world), non-verbal. communication is the preferred method by which feelings – and secrets – are expressed. “I always kind of had the idea that [Darl] and Dewey Dell knew things about each other,” Cash says. Darl knows Dewey Dell is pregnant, but she hasn't told anyone. The novel posits that this type of communication is more valuable than verbal communication: the non-verbal, almost telepathic connection they use to communicate has a consistent veracity where information transmitted via verbal communication is subject to human error and general subjectivity. This mode circumvents questions of propriety and fear that might inspire attempts to conceal the truth. Dewey Dell says, “…and then I saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without words, just like he told me mom was going to die without words, and I knew he knew because if he had said he knew with words, I would not have believed that he had been there and that he had seen us" (27).Dewey Dell affirms the authenticity of telepathic communication. She only knows that Darl really knows about her sexual encounter with Lafe and the subsequent pregnancy thanks to the silent method by which he communicated it to her. Like her mother, she is wary of words; people can use words to lie and deceive. His connection to Darl, however, goes beyond this: it is a sophisticated method of communication, unaffected by human fallibility; he operates on a higher plane. The eye is a motif in As I Lay Dying; it is a vehicle for truthful non-verbal communication of impressions, thoughts and feelings. Looks, glances, and flashes of life and color convey meaning more truthfully and holistically than language. Almost every page of the novel, whoever the narrator, is sprinkled with allusions to the characters' eyes: "the pale rigidity of his eyes" (128), "his groping eyes" (132), "his eyes, the life in them, suddenly rushing at them” (48). The look has the power to reveal feelings in a distilled and simplified way. manner. Dewey Dell has specific reasons for having to go to town and Samson's attempts to force Anse to abandon the trip infuriates her: “…and then I found this girl watching me. If his eyes had been guns, I would not speak now” (115). “…I had done nothing to him that I knew of,” said Samson; although he can't understand why her gaze projects such anger, her eyes absolutely betray her feelings. Darl’s eyes – his gaze – Tull theorizes, are what “makes people talk” about him; they are the real culprits of his accession to the status of “other” within the community. “I always say it was never so much what he did or said or anything, as much as the way he looked at you” (125). Darl's gaze then communicated something to those he came into contact with, a part of himself became evident through the way he looked. What is communicated, however, is unexpected and disturbing. The eyes are the window into a person, the space through which one must pass to access another human being; therefore, the significance of the gaze in As I Lay Dying is immense. Through their respective gazes, Darl and Cash are able to connect in this way: "...he and I look at each other with long inquisitive glances, gazes that peer unhindered through each other's eyes and into the secret place ultimate where, for a moment, [we] crouch blatantly and shamelessly…alert, secretive, and unashamed” (142). Both are “unashamed” in this moment; they are in a supernatural and complete communication – a communication in which words play no role – and through it they achieve a kind of peace. Tull says that the way Darl looks is "as if he's gotten inside you, somehow" (125). What is unsettling then is that the person seen will enter into a sort of involuntary (and unfamiliar) communication in which Darl is able to see and understand this individual in a perhaps complete and unsettling way. Language is an imperfect means of expression: under its restrictions, emotions and human beings are reduced to abstract signs (words and names, respectively) and complicated ideas are often unable to materialize properly, superficial signs collapsing under the weight of the levels and nuances of ideas. The people who populate the novel (the Bundrens, the Tulls, the various neighbors and others) do not have much respect for the spoken work, their conversations reflecting this in their terseness and general irrelevance. The characters' instinct is.