Stephen M. Ross on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

            To illustrate how the characters mimetic voice is also responsible for creating illusions of other characters in the story we can juxtapose Darl’s and Dewey Dell’s references to one another. Darl’s narrative is intelligent, well read, yet his chauvinistic and repulsed descriptions of Dewey Dell illustrate a young girl, pre-sexual, designed for maternal care. Her own narrative presents a binary opposition to Darl’s descriptions of her, meanwhile exposing his clairvoyance to the reader by explaining how they communicate via glances, this ability is shared also by their mother. Her dreams and actions present her as a highly sexual and confused woman urging to break free from the confines of her familial expectations. The character’s own perceptions are only a fragment of the other characters, an illusion to the reader because what is described to us is filtered by their personal opinions. Through the novel as a whole, these illusions are broken down when we as readers piece together the facets of all the other characters creating a “cubistic bug” by which we know the charaters.