How do we respond to trauma (brokenness, disconnection, ruptures, holes, lacks) and to unfulfilled needs, yearnings, hungers, desires? What do we think? What do we invent? Who do we plan? What do we do? How do our responses affect others' responses? Do we heal? Our selves? Others? How? Do we ease suffering? Do we exacerbate it? Do we become more vulnerable? Do we grow stronger? How?
In your response you might think about As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner or Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut in terms of these questions. How does the book you've read take on these questions? & what do you, personally, think about the way the book has taken the questions on? Refer to specific passages and scenes in work. Refer to patterns and other choices made by the author. Use all your lit analysis skills (your head) but also bring in your full self, including your heart.
If others have posted then read the posts. You might be compelled to respond.
If issues unrelated to the questions I've written above are the ones that press upon you most vigorously then write about those.
Whatever you write about I'm looking forward to illuminating and lively comments.
Jacklyn L.
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As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, is about a family who undertakes a journey to bury Addie a mother, a wife, and to some other things. The family deals with their grief in different ways. The youngest of the family, Vardaman, is completely traumatized by the death of his mother. He equates his mother to being the fish that was gutted and cut into small pieces. In some cases Addie is like a fish when her coffin tries to escape. Her truth death is something that Vardaman never fully comprehends and in this sense of the matter it seems that he remains innocent. He equates that Jewel’s mother is a horse. Darl is the character who understands Addie’s death and tries to understand how people react to it and to understand that. He wants to overcome her death and stop the grieving that he is going through. To some extent it seems as though he would no longer like to feel anything. In some cases it also seems that Darl thinks that she deserved to die. Dewey Dell seems that she does not really respond to her mother’s death because she is so preoccupied with being pregnant. Also because of the fact that she seems to allow life to pass her by and takes a passive role in it that to her this is just another speed bump. Anse uses Addie’s death as an excuse to get himself teeth. During the time of the transport of the body however he makes himself look like a good Christian man who is just trying to grant his wife’s last wish. Anse responds to the death truly like the selfish man that he is. by the end of the book he is married once more and it seems as though maybe he does not want to respond to the death fully. Addie herself responds to her death with indifference. To her all life truly was was getting ready to die and she had fulfilled that purpose and did not feel a strong attachment to Earth because she was cold and unloving towards her family. Jewel becomes angered by her death and not necessarily because it was his mother. It seems that he is more angry about the fact that he will not be able to make money while on this journey. However he is completely committed to his family and undergoes the journey with them and even gives up his horse so that the family will be able to complete the journey. Carl consciously decides that he does not want to respond to the death of his mother. He wishes to forget it and continue to make things and listen to the pretty music. To him thinking about it will drive someone crazy just like it did to Darl. Whitfield responds to Addie’s death as his sentence to Hell because he never told Anse what kind of woman Addie was like and felt as though he did not perform his Christian duty. The novel is able to show various ways in which people respond to grief and how in some cases the mind can not handle it and will choose to shut down or drive the person crazy or to watch it happen passively or confront it head on.
Kelly Benson
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5/8/11
Trauma and war pretty much go hand in hand. As any war veteran could concur, it was the most traumatic and scarring experience of their life. For Vonnegut his own experiences in the U.S army and the Battle of the Bulge cause him to write very intense and true literature. The book Slaughterhouse Five portrays a central question: what is invented in human mind in the attempt to block out misery? The main character Billy Pilgrim has been mentally ruined by what the violence of the war has done to him, and he escapes it by the creation of Tralfamadorians. Who are they you ask? Just small two-foot tall upside down plunger looking aliens that abduct him one night to do some extraterrestrial studies on him and another human. As strange as it sounds to make something like that up, their way of life is ideal to Billy, where death is only for a moment, and looking at the nicer things in life is more important. In the sense of utopias and dystopias, Billy’s real life turned into a utopia, with a wealthy father in law and a wife and kids. Perfect. Yet to him, his short time in a dystopia has created a pocket in his mind that can never be filled with reality, but rather fiction.
Statistically, people who work in slaughterhouses are almost guaranteed to quit after at most 5 years because of the trauma that take hold of you while dealing with dead animal. In the novel, where Billy Pilgrim was held as a POW, it was an old slaughterhouse that created his permanent terror in the future. I just thought it would be necessary to add that bit of information because he was being held prisoner in the worst place possible, which had changed his view on things forever. That’s how he led himself to the hospital for shock treatment, and marrying perfection and dreaming of fiction that would ease the memories.
Tom Martin
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The many ways in which we as humans respond to trauma, (whether it be through acceptance of what lies before us, complete denial, immense grief, or strained disconnection) are all explored in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Through the character’s reactions to the death of Addie Bundren, the reader is able to understand the differences in dealing with tragedy, as well as the ways humans try to ease their suffering, solve their problems, and show both their strengths and weaknesses. With the death of Addie, the matriarch of her poor family, her husband and children react in a variety of different ways as they transport her body in order to carry out her wishes for her burial. We can see how many possibilities and differences there are within each individual human perspective, as each member of the Bundren family deals with the loss of Addie in a different way. The youngest, Vardamon, is overcome with grief over the loss of his mother and does not know how to handle the sting of tragedy, though he takes it with a grain of salt, imagining his mother in the same sense as a fish he caught earlier, relating her death to the fish’s capture and cleaning. Dewey Dell, the daughter, is too preoccupied over the occurrence of her sudden pregnancy. The anxiety of a surprise pregnancy is enough stress for Dell and therefore she doesn’t have time to wander in grief over mother’s death, it simply passes her by as she searches for solutions to her condition through abortion drugs. Cash is persistent in his grief, a selfless character, he mourns Addie’s loss by staying dedicated to her lasting impression of him, for he is the one who built her coffin himself. Jewel and Darl react in quite different ways. Jewel may seem like a selfish brute throughout much of the journey to bury Addie in Jefferson, but in reality he holds great passion for his mother. He is loving and dedicated to her even after death. On the other hand, the character that seemed the most dedicated in the first place, Darl, becomes too frustrated over the grief of the loss as well as the trials of the journey, that he resorted to attempting to incinerate Addie’s coffin on fire so that they wouldn’t have to journey further to bury her. And the patriarch of the family, Addie’s husband, Anse, seems to react in the most mysterious yet at the same time predictable way of all: after staying dedicated to his wife’s wishes through obligation, the hated father buries his wife and subsequently acquires a new set of false teeth (a motivator in his journey to Jefferson) and a new wife all at the same time.
Tom Martin
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Whether it be through accepting grief and contemplating how one feels about it, becoming too preoccupied and stressed to accept a seemingly undeniable truth, staying strong in your dedication and reacting to grief in a stable manner, passionately ignoring grief in fear of exposure, become oppressed by many trials of grief and breakdown from pressure, or denying any sense of the trauma in a serious manner, the characters of the novel present the many different facets of the human perspective of trauma in revealing ways. When a traumatic event occurs, one usually reacts in any of these ways. It’s not always between two options: accept or deny. One can be overthrown by grief or find relief in it’s liberation, it’s solution to a problem or creation of a diversion or exposure of a load. On the other hand, one can find great tragedy in trauma or grief, one can be consumed by it’s sharp teeth, it’s unforgiving impressions. As I Lay Dying’s characters both grew stronger and more vulnerable due to the event of Addie’s death, through their reactions. While Jewel found strength, Darl crumbled. While the other siblings were persistent in their conditions, they also found faults in their reactions to the tragedy that lied before them. Each member of the Bundren family showed weakness in their reaction to Addie’s death. Vardamon compared his mother to a fish, he used imagination to escape the human truth in front of him. Cash ignored his own personal inflictions. Dell was too preoccupied with her own situation, looking toward abortion pills and desperately contemplating sexual services to get what she wanted. And Anse, though he know it was wrong, though he was ashamed, acquired that set of false teeth, and presented the new wife he met while burying his old one, to his children all in the same day. While each character grew in individual character-building ways, each fell, and showed their vulnerability, faltering as humans. While no human is perfect, the way in which we react to a traumatic human event, such as death, shows a lot about a person’s sense of character, a person’s sense of mind. The Bundrens are a dysfunctional family and they are not ashamed of it. Even Addie exposed the fact that she had an affair, claiming Jewel to not be Anse’s biological son. Through each tragedy that occurs throughout the novel, Addie’s death, Dell’s pregnancy, the destruction on the river when the coffin almost sunk, Cash’s broken leg, Darl setting the coffin on fire, and more, each character presents their reaction to tragedy, to trauma, in a way that exposes their true character, what makes them who they are. As I Lay Dying answers the question of how humans react to trauma in a simple way: they don’t just react, they act. They put on a show. They’re not afraid to show that they can respond to even the darkest of tragedies in an unpredictable, character-revealing way. The novel creates characters through trauma, through grief in order to build up a better sense of what it means to humanly react to tragedy.
Dewey Dell has more trauma than her mother dying. That she is pregnant but can’t let anyone know actually eclipses for her the possible sadness of her mother’s death. Her mother’s death was “too soon” (120) for her to deal with it. Through her sense of loneliness made even deeper by the child inside of her, she is distant to the others, and secretive, but by her secrecy she becomes more vulnerable to @!#!s such as MacGowen. Despite being distant from her family and even Lafe, Dewey Dell looks after Vardaman, the only boy in her family with whom she has a semblance of a spoken conversation.
ReplyDeleteVardaman responds to his mother’s death in a couple of ways. He blames Peabody and chases his team out of the barn, venting his confused anger by hitting a stick around, at one point relating his actions to those of Jewel. Most notably, Vardaman relates his mother and her death to the fish he was told to cut up. The question of where his mother went is what seems to get him. Hating the idea of her being trapped and not able to breathe, he opens the window on his dead mother’s face and bores holes in the coffin. His mother is a body. His mother is a fish. He wants the coffin rescued from the water, but escapes in thoughts that maybe his mother escaped from the coffin into the river.
While Vardaman is for the most part upset by the coffin, to Cash the coffin seems to be a way he can control the situation. Making a place for her to die, and for that place to be of his own good craftsmanship, he makes a “neater job” of it all. Even so, he cannot make everything reasonable. Even his list is atypical and somewhat illogical. Number 6 is “Except,” from which point he discusses “Animal magnetism” in points to which is imposed a list form. He almost denies his own physical trauma in the attempt to be practical or to think it away, not complaining about his broken leg or the cement cast.
ReplyDeleteOne thing about this book that really gets me is how Anse can work toward his own benefit the whole time and still see himself as a martyr or an altruistic man on an honorable quest. In the greater part of his chapters he talks about getting his teeth so that he can eat the food the Lord made for Man to eat. He copes with his wife's death by using it to replace her and his teeth. Anse hardly, if ever, helps his sons in moving the coffin, but he “wouldn’t be beholden to no man.” It is as though he considers the work of his sons his own work, but he resents that Jewel earned the horse by working nights. Jewel, in his turn, takes things into his own hands to deal with issues. He wanted his own horse and went out and earned one. He got the coffin into the wagon, out of the river, and away from the burning barn (saving his mother from “water and fire”), but his motivations for taking action differ from those of Cash. Rather than be a part of the next step, as it were, in Addie Bundren’s death by making the coffin for her to lie in and others to see, Jewel would have it that he and Addie be on a hill as she dies, him throwing rocks at the faces of people coming to gawk. From this, I take it that Jewel, while he takes action in his life, does not like to soften or ignore circumstances. While both he and Cash deal with trauma physically, Cash’s motivations seem to be to create something perhaps recognizable from his surroundings, while Jewel vents himself on his surroundings, is almost on the same grounds as them. (Note the abusive relationship between him and his horse.)
ReplyDeleteWilliam Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is a book written in passages singling out specific character’s points of views that, when all put together, creates a story. Because the book is written this way, we have the best insight to all of the character’s thoughts, feelings and personalities, as they speak for themselves about different scenarios they find themselves in. The book is the personal accounts of the Bundren family, as they travel to Jefferson to bury their mother and wife, Addie, and the problems that occur on the way. The main characters’s of the book are the Bundren children, Vardaman, Cash, Darl, Dewey Dell and Jewel, and their parents Addie and Anse. Each of the characters deal with their grief very differently because of their different personalities.
ReplyDeleteVardaman is the youngest of the Bundren children, and the one who has the hardest time understanding the death of his mother. He compares his mother’s death to the death of a fish, which is the center of his thought for a good amount of his narration in the book. He explains to us that a fish “is” when it is alive, but it is “not” when it is dead. So a dead fish is a not-fish. The fish’s blood is “not” fish blood. Therefore his mother is no longer his mother but his not-mother and she no longer “is”. Although it seems that he understands her death, this is not clear because he is later found nailing air holes in his mother’s coffin, which means that he believes she still needs air to breathe. My favorite quote of Vardaman’s is “my mother is a fish” when he decides that because his mother is dead like the fish that he caught, she must also be a fish.
Dewey Dell is the only female left in the Bundren family after Addie’s death, and this leaves her with an ongoing sense of sexuality throughout the book. We constantly connect Dewey Dell with sexuality because her passages dwell on it, from her dream that she is motionless and carried by men, to her sexual encounter with Lafe and her pregnancy. We even see sexuality when Tull describes how each of the Bundren’s looks at him, and he describes Dewey Dell’s look to be as if he touched her. Dewey Dell never really deals with the grief of her mother and constantly distracts herself with thoughts of Lafe and thoughts of her pregnancy. So Dewey Dell is dealing with her loss by trying to forget that it ever happened, and focus on herself, which is very similar to the way that Anse is handling his wife’s death, selfishly. I would not have initially said that Dewey Dell was being selfish in the family’s time of mourning, but in the scene in the barn where she is trying to find Vardaman, she gets distracted by her own thoughts that she almost forgets what she went in the barn for in the first place, and accuses Vardaman of spying on her. This scene was a little bit weird but showed where Dewey Dell’s thoughts always were and her constant focus with her pregnancy, not the death of her mother.
Darl’s way of dealing with his loss, is almost identical to Addie’s way of thinking outside of the world to deal with her lack of happiness on Earth and her obsession with death. They both think in a way that it outside of the world, and very complicated to those trying to get into their thoughts. Addie even explained in her passage that she thought words were useless in describing feelings and thoughts, so I excused myself from really trying to understand her harsh feelings towards the world and her husband Anse. Darl’s character is described as strange in the neighborhood, mainly because of the way that he looks at you. Tull explained his look as if he was looking right through to his soul, in one section. Darl is definitely similar to his mother in the way that he thinks and views the world.
It is made clear by Faulkner in As I Lay Dying that humans respond to trauma in a multitude of ways. Although all of the characters clearly exhibit the signs and symptoms of experiencing a recent traumatic event, I am most interested in how Addie's death affects her middle, illegitimate son Jewel.
ReplyDeleteJewel Bundren is indirectly characterized by his actions which, through the eyes of his family and the rest of the community, come off as defiant and selfish. He is recognized as Addie's favorite son and she places him above God himself stating “he is my cross and he will be my salvation. He will save me from the water and from the fire. Even though I have laid down my life, he will save me” (168). This statement acts as a sort of foreshadowing, because even though Jewel is regarded as ungrateful, he is the one who struggled the most to save Addie's coffin from the stream. This action makes it clear that his mother's death affects Jewel in ways he does not vocalize like the rest of his brothers. Instead he displays a devotion to his deceased mother that he did not display during her life. He even agrees to sell his horse in order for Anse to afford a new team for the trip. Jewel is one of the only characters that does not have very many passages from his viewpoint, instead readers are left to decipher his actions through the eyes of his family members. This fact in part characterizes Jewel; he is not a man of many words and often keeps to himself in an aloof manner.
The trauma of Addie's death drives Jewel to act in ways which he never had before. Instead of breaking him down (like it does to Darl) the trauma instead works to aid Jewel's growth as a brother, son and young man.
A.J. Mizzoni says,
ReplyDelete"Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut is a story that is put on paper describing a mans mind that has been mangled from war. From the time warps to the alien abductions, billy is suffering from post are shell shock. The first chapter I am sure is an introduction to the story because it does not really mention the main character bill Pilgrim. However my response brings up the question of who are we. After reading this story I feel a like bit head mangled. I have come to the conclusion that we are exactly who we think we are. In our mind we can change our lives to exactly how we want them to be. In our mind if we convince ourselves things they appear reality. This makes sense to me because I feel that I have experienced this myself. Sometimes I feel that my dreams are reality. This story is much like that of "Going After Caciatto". It deals with distinguishing reality from truth. It brings up the thought of what if you are blind and everything you see is just your mind playing tricks. What if you're in a different world that what you think you are in. I feel like the main thing in this story is don't believe everything. Don't doubt anything because anything is possible. We talk about distinguishing truth from fiction, but is there really a difference?
As I Lay Dying is a book that challenged me as a reader and a person. Not often is the human mind able to see an event (be it fictional or otherwise) from multiple consciousnesses, yet Faulkner does just that, allowing me, the reader, to look through the eyes of everyone involved. I am without my notes, but from memory I can recall a few of the themes and motifs that stood out to me, the first being the subject of coping. Death and other traumas affect the mind substantially, and the way that people deal with it reflects their personalities. Faulkner uses this to indirectly characterize a character such as Darl, using his actions and dialogue with others to reflect his unique method of coping. For instance, Darl at one point asks Jewel (for the record, I am paraphrasing) “you know that Ma is going to die, right?” When he gets no answer, he asks again. Darl is a realist, and because of this, his mother’s imminent death is a devastating realization for him. He wonders if anybody else has noticed, and seeks to bring others to the same realization in an effort to get a reaction out of them; he exhibits the normal human temptation to justify his feelings by judging the reactions of others. Darl hopes to accomplish this by asking Jewel said question. This and other social issue are approached by Faulkner this way, and is something I have enjoyed about AILD.
ReplyDeleteAnother small thing that I thought interesting about the text is faulkners acute use of point of view. Things happen, such as Anse rubbing his hands on his knees when he is stressed out, that are repeated by each character’s account, creating a consistent atmosphere from the reader’s standpoint. The inconsistencies of each account are what have drawn my interest. Like a game of telephone that I used to play as a child, the dialogue changes depending on who tells the story. Anse will be quoted in one passage as saying something one way, and then when dictated by another character, his quote changes. It reflects something that happens in my life every day, and is yet another clever, and true, social observation by Faulkner, an aesthetic aspect of AILD that for some reason impressed/interested me.
According to Medicine.net, “Acute stress disorder (ASD) is an anxiety disorder that can develop immediately following a traumatic event.” The characters in Faulkner’s novel have responses that follow the diagnosis of the disorder. Many of the characters are faced with the Addie dying and the aftermath that occurs with her desired burial.
ReplyDeleteBetween unfulfilled needs and desires there exists a delicate relationship that must be at equilibrium. In terms of unfulfilled needs, Addie, before dying, wants to be buried in the town of Jefferson. Since this will be done post mortem, could it be called an unfulfilled need or wish? As there does exist a lack of reliance and affection within the Bundren family. Though this will be a journey from the Bundren home, Anse feels that he is obligated to do so. In terms of desire, Anse is the other side of the scale, in which he exhibits the desire to fulfill Addie’s deathwish.
Now I asked myself when reading this: Even though this was a wish post death for Addie, should this be considered an unfulfilled need because because of the lack of faith that is exhibited when she is on her deathbed? From the Bundren family, they are already beginning to experience shock from their mother’s death. Their response, since it takes on different shapes in terms of reaction, is rather callous.
“Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the
Chuck. Chuck. Chuck of the adze.” (Faulkner 5)
Though this is taken from Darl’s narrative perspective, it relates to a similar emotion that Cash uses as a driving force to build the coffin. The quote itself clearly answers the questions as to what Cash’s motivation is and his thought processes were, though voice from Darl. The difference between Darl’s viewpoint and Cash’s is that Darl has much more obvious affection for Addie than Cash.
Upon the finishing the novel, my views on how the Bundren family expressed and coped with the trauma of the death of Addie changed little. Anse, though feeling and fulfilling the obligation to the Jefferson burial, I believe does it more so that he can have a clear conscience to move on with his life. After all, his marriage to Addie was a loveless one. The false teeth become a symbol that relates to the motif of tools and more specifically to Anse. The thing he wants the most will promise him a new sense of enriched vanity and, right in the name, there exists a superficial feel, for they are false. So does that confident smile give him the courage or is he rid of that mouth that was part of his unhappy marriage and life to Addie. New teeth, new woman I guess.
We were talking today about the ambivalence of the reader to these characters. People were questioning, in both ways, of how one could feel sympathy for them, or vice versa. Faulkner is an expert at creating this ambivalence within the reader. I’m aware that this family is not the brightest bunch, and the underlying sense of individualism within the group is flagrant, but underneath all of this, I feel pity. It may be their stupidity that stimulates my sympathy. I see the family taking on a futile trek. Addie’s corpse is rotting, and it wreaks of hopelessness. I see the family trudging on despite the ridiculous obstacles, and can’t help but feel for them. So what is causing them to continue? Each has their own motivation. I think that for each’s motivation, love plays a small part. It’s definitely larger in some’s minds, most would agree that Jewel feels strongly for his mother than Anse.
ReplyDeleteAddie’s death did a lot to the family. In some cases it brought them together, while in other’s it drove them further apart. Both Jewel and Vardaman find reconciliation by trying to visualize their mother in animals. Jewel sees his mom as a horse while Vardaman sees her as a fish. In both cases, they visualize her as something that is able to live on outside of the coffin.
Something else that jumped at me, but we haven’t talked much about it, is the theme of secrecy in the novel. Many characters hold secrets. Dewey is pregnant, and Jewel was born out of wedlock (plus his entire horse story). In addition, Darl is often in tune with these secrets. He seems to know everything that is going on in his siblings’ lives to such an extent that he loses sense of his own feelings. It’s like he becomes overwhelmed by being the secret-keeper and just short circuits. Next thing we know, Vardaman becomes the new secret keeper, witnessing Darl burn down the barn. In my mind, it is this common theme of secrecy that makes this family dysfunctional. It certainly leads to Darl’s, once the most morally sound character, downfall.