Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

Day two of As I Lay Dying felt as strong and lively as the first day. We moved through the more eventful second half of the novel, reading about the flood, fire, and continued struggles and absurdity of the Bundren family—including Cash’s broken leg (fixed with cement!?), Addie's postmortem reflections, and Darl’s mental unraveling. I was again very pleased and heartened to work with engaged, intelligent adults who are eager to discuss what they’ve read.

Early on, we paid a lot of attention to the last “Darl” chapter, when he’s become fully unhinged and awaits the train ride to the mental asylum in Jackson, Mississippi. He is “Darl,” “he,” and “I” to himself at this point:

Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed. “What are you laughing at?” I said.

Moving, emotional, and a little troubling. Perhaps more so are Darl’s last words in this chapter:

Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.

            “Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”

When I read (or reread) this chapter, I’m always struck by how much Darl has unraveled here—in part because of his mother’s death, in part because of the arduous journey he’s just completed. Jewel, I think, is the most important narrator for the way he encapsulates the family’s many dysfunctions, but this final “Darl” chapter seems one of the most poignant. Is there an Early Darl and a Late Darl, or just one emotionally complex and dynamic character?

Beyond Darl: One student brought up a good point about the lack of anger/censure against the Vardaman character for (albeit unintentionally) boring holes into his dead mother’s face. In his confused grief, he thinks she's alive and needs to breathe in the coffin. This reader vocalized what many of the novel’s readers may feel—that is, why a lot of the Bundren characters seem to accept (or be silenced by) some of the more absurd events of the novel.

With many writers but especially Faulkner, treating a book as a nonlinear story to be read, reread, and reviewed is the best strategy. How, I posed to the class, can we reconsider the early Darl chapters in light of what we learn about his mental instability later? Nabokov may have said it best: "Curiously, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it." In the case of As I Lay Dying, this strong, intelligent group should gain even more by rereading our first book.

This kind of rereading strategy will help them with our next novel, the much more sweeping and complicated Light in August.