Judgements

The discussion we had in class was really interesting -- I do feel like we started off kind of making fun of the Bundrens. I do think MacGowan is kind of an extreme example of the kind of judgement the Bundrens face, although it is a bit of an effective shock at the end of the novel. However, people like Peabody and the Tulls have been criticizing and sort of making fun of the Bundrens the whole novel -- Peabody has some particularly great lines. So why do they get more of a pass than MacGowan?

Maybe one of the reasons is that Peabody & the Tulls are both about as rural as the Bundrens. Peabody maybe travels around for his job more than Anse, who has a philosophy about not moving too much, but they both seem to be on the same side. There doesn't seem to be any particular fondness between Peabody and Anse, but Anse still calls Peabody for help, and Peabody still looks at Addie, despite the fact that there's nothing he can really do. Peabody isn't taking advantage of the family at all, just extremely critical of them. It's the same thing with the Tulls -- the couple is actually quite helpful to the Bundrens, they just criticize them a lot privately as well -- so it's easy to excuse them making fun of the family.

Another part of this is that MacGowan is specifically totally looking down on Dewey Dell in particular. The large majority of what we've talked about in class about her has been very sympathetic to her -- she really hasn't done anything wrong, and she's in a terrible predicament because she doesn't have a lot of education. I don't really remember Peabody or the Tulls really making fun of Dewey Dell in particular -- there's a lot to criticize about Anse, but really, how can you be mean to Dewey Dell? Even if Peabody and the Tulls aren't really aware of her "problem" she seems to be decently competent and not super weird like Darl.

There's also the fact that MacGowan's narration is just incredibly slimy.

Darl

Darl is a very interesting character in the novel As I Lay Dying. As we talked about in class he has a really interesting narrative style & his final chapter makes you look back on the rest of his narration in the book a bit. Darl has always seemed a bit strange -- I liked his chapters if just for the great descriptions he had. A lot of the other character have nice lines but Darl is the only one with the really poetic descriptions, which make his chapters fun to read. The writing is also maybe a bit more clear than some of the chapters where the narrators have a heavy dialect and jump around a lot, making them harder to follow.

Darl's seeming ability to narrate scenes he has no part in is something that's really hard to explain. Although a lot of Darl's narration is supported by other characters -- I don't think any characters really contradict him -- Darl might just be hearing about certain events and embellishing the details -- he does seem to have a particularly active imagination.

Darl seems relatively sane during most of the book, but setting fire to the barn and his all-over-the-place narration in his final chapter call into question whether he's really just "artistic." Is it just some kind of grief? He has that annoying habit of nagging Jewel and Dewey Dell, which is a bit of a dick move but doesn't necessarily mean anything bigger -- but could it be another manifestation of how he reacts to grief? Or is this something deeper that's coming out?

Inside Llewyn Davis

I actually hadn't seen O Brother, Where Art Thou before & I really enjoyed it. It reminded me of another Coen brothers movie (maybe because of the soundtrack?): Inside Llewyn Davis. This is kind of a tangent blog post & contains a lot of vague spoilers for the movie so my apologies in advance that this might be kind of hard to comment on if you haven't seen the movie. The basic gist of this post is possible hero's journeys that end in depressing/unsuccessful ways so if you have any examples of that, feel free to comment.

Another reason Inside Llewyn Davis came to mind besides some similarities in music is that it does involve a hero's journey of sorts (if you relax the terms...). The main character, Llewyn, starts off with a really depressing but kind of boring life -- he has no money, he's sleeping on couches, he lost someone's cat (named Ulysses!) and has to pay for another girl's abortion. He is also just overall a bit unlikable/annoying, like Odysseus and Everitt to a lesser extent. He has a sort of musician's pride -- belief that he's good -- but he also can be kind of a dick to people (see: the girl he knocked up). He eventually decides he wants to audition for some guy in Chicago and gets a ride there (from New York). This is the kind of big journey, where he has adventures and stuff (there's also a loose connection to O Brother Where Art Thou in that John Goodman is also in this movie and here he's a slightly less shady character but similarly negative).

The movie starts to diverge from the typical hero's journey here in that everything goes wrong -- Llewyn abandons John Goodman and his ride, gets turned down at the audition (and then reminded of his dead friend), hits a cat on the way home, etc. There's a point here where he could turn around -- he drives past Akron, Ohio, where he was told a girl who he thought had had an abortion but didn't lives (terrible sentence, sorry), and he seems to contemplate getting off at the exit but ultimately drives on. Later he tries to join the merchant marine union but can't find his papers so is denied -- both of these are points where he could turn his life around or at least change it but he's ultimately unable. One thing I really liked about the movie is it just ends where it began & it makes it seem like ultimately, Llewyn accomplished nothing, despite the hints of some great journey earlier in the film -- a twist on the typical journey.