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?
Definitely agree that Darl's descriptions are great -- he encapsulates his family members so vividly and (we are to presume) accurately. I sometimes wish we had explicit characterization like that for Darl himself -- the other characters' narrations don't really include artistic, novel-like descriptions, but rather capture simply how people really would think. What we really have for Darl is that he's "queer" and seems to be kind of out of it, which doesn't really say as much as I'd like to know.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I really loved Darl's narrations because of all the description. It seemed so strange later on when he just decided to burn the farm. Sure, it was mentioned that others see Darl as being strange but it still seems out of character for Darl to just go crazy like that. Maybe it's a sign that he was already crazy, but didn't show it until then?
ReplyDeleteI actually prefer Cash's narration. It's flat, in his language, and it gets the point across. I know that Darl doesn't speak like he writes, however, I can most certainly say that Cash does speak like he writes. When Cash is narrating he has this funny tone to it, and I like the way he thinks of things and the way he has his opinion on them. When he describes the scene where Darl is being taken to the mental institution, for example, he says that whether someone is crazy or not can't be just determined. Each person has their own views upon whether someone is crazy or not, and a person can't be judged by one man's opinion.
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