Analyzing The Complex Characters of Darl and Jewel

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. He wrote a variety of short stories, plays, and novels, including the classic As I Lay Dying. This innovative novel, published in 1930, has a sense of dark humour and shock value. It has an unconventional narrative style, with 15 first person narrators. As I Lay Dying features The Bundrens, an incredibly poor family who live on their farm in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional county in Mississippi. The family matriarch, Addie Bundren, dies early in the novel. The rest of the story is based on her family- her husband, Anse, and their five children: Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman, and their attempt to fulfill her wish of being buried in Jefferson. They must transport her coffin on a wagon across the county, a trip which takes a total of ten days. They encounter many obstacles during their journey, all while trying to deal with the death of their recently passed mother. While the whole family goes to Jefferson for varying motivations, it seems that Jewel is the driving force of the journey, which Darl does everything in his power to sabotage it.

Jewel Bundren is the 3rd son of Addie, and he is also the bastard child of Addie and minister Whitfield. In Addie’s monologue, she expresses that after giving birth to Cash and Darl, she felt unsatisfied with her life. She states “I knew that it had been, not that my aloneness had to be violated over and over each day, but that it had never been violated until Cash came” (Faulkner 172). She felt no romantic connection to Anse, which is when she began the brief affair with minister Whitfield. As a result, she got pregnant and gave birth to Jewel, knowing that Whitfield was his paternal father. After Jewel, she ...

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... becomes the journey’s saboteur (Hayes 49). Jewel views the trip to Jefferson as a way to fulfill his mother’s wish, while a detached Darl views it as ridiculous and time consuming, costing the Bundren family what little they do have. Jewel’s grief manifests itself as anger, and Darl’s inability to come to terms with Addie’s death leads him deeper into despair. As the trip progresses, Darl falls deeper into madness and attempts to burn down a barn with his mother inside. Jewel, risking his life, saves his mother’s coffin. The personalities of Jewel and Darl bundren are complex and divergent.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text. Vintage International, New York, hhh1985. Print.

Hayes, Elizabeth. “Tension between Darl and Jewel”. University of North Carolina Press

(1992): 49-61. The Southern Literary Journal. Web. Spring 1992.