In the solitary chapter Addie has to personify her character in As I Lay Dying, she explains her lack of attachment to language as being rooted in the idea that words never reflect the complexity of the experience they attempt to communicate. Describing them as “just a shape to fill a lack” and “when the right time came you wouldn’t need need a word” (Faulkner 172), Addie reflects on various stages of her life during which words were used or forgotten in her presence, or by her, emphasizing how the unreliability and inaccuracy of words can only cause unnecessary pain and miscommunication. As a result, acceptance of a wordless state affords Addie greater emotional freedom. 

Operating on a principle embedded within her psyche from a very early age by her father, a principle which states that the point of living was to prepare to stay dead (Faulkner 169), Addie develops a rather impersonal attitude and straightforward approach to handling various aspects of life, life bearing children and interacting with others. The way in which she narrates her chapter matter-of-factly glosses over various life milestones with abrupt statements lacking description, like the repetitive mention of: “So I took Anse”  (Faulkner 170-171) to point to Addie’s emotional detachment from life, as manifested in her dismissal of words. Originating at the stage at which Addie had her first child, Cash, Addie’s dysfunctional conclusion that “living was terrible” marked her abandonment of language: “that was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say” (Faulkner 171). Proceeding to elaborate on several instances in which this claim proves apparent, Addie mentions how the scholars who defined concepts like motherhood, pride, and fear, must never have felt or understood the scope of such things, in order to ascribe a brief word to define an experienced so nuanced with polarizing and indecipherable feelings. Describing her acceptance of a world crippled by an attachment to language, Addie explains how her husband’s use of the word “love”, although unnecessary, remains his choice. By then, Addie has already become accustomed to society’s use of words, and appears freer for it: “Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, let Anse use it, if he wants to” (Faulkner 172). In the end, even Cora’s reprimands and judgement holds no influence over her, as Addie simply concludes that those same words which breed sin, also grant salvation. Juxtaposing a word’s ability to be both powerful and ineffectual, as based on perception, Addie logically emphasizes the unnecessary nature of language, attributing to words a sphere of influence that could be avoided with a freeing abandonment of language, such as her own.

Although Addie’s rejection of language remains rooted in dysfunction, not unlike Dewey’s own, it’s difficult to blame her for desiring a less complicated relationship with life. Her theory of language, resting on the fundamental claim that words are only a “shape to fill a lack”, logically exposes all the weaknesses of language, namely that of inaccuracy in conveying meaning, and leading to miscommunication among people who, as she states, spill the same blood when struck. Although this relationship to language, paired with her troubled upbringing ends up distancing Addie from her husband, children, and neighbors, rendering her unable to ground herself in life by finding beauty and meaning in simple things, had she been more positive and open-minded, this theory could have, in practice, led to a happier life.

With the obvious image of “laying dying” as a notably overarching representation of the  liminal state in the novel, there are a few subtler in-between states that contextualize the build up to and effect of Addie’s eventual death. Some of these in-between states reveal themselves in the form of each character’s individual goals, and the gradual ways in which they strive to attain them, whereas other representations of this state manifest in physical states, whether this be literal body decay or natural developments in the body. 

Continually putting emphasis on the hardworking aspect of rural life, where the weather beats down on the body and the hot air suffocates, the novel’s attention to grotesque details in relation to both the bodies of animals and the characters speaks to each character’s preoccupation with attaining any small comfort. With each character ultimately working towards a goal, the liminal state of Addie’s slow dying becomes mirrored by the in-between states of each character en route to fulfilling a personal goal. For Cash, it’s the purchase of new carpentry tools, for Dewey, it’s reaching a doctor to get a pregnancy, for Anse it’s the purchase of new teeth, and so on. “It’s a hard country on man; it’s hard” Anse states, shortly after the death of his wife, “But now I can get them teeth. That will be a comfort. It will” (Faulkner 111). The simultaneously comical and disconsolate nature of the irony of being excited to have an excuse for going into town, both to bury his wife and get new teeth, unmistakably paints all of these individual side-motives for taking the coffin into town as liminal in-between states of slow progression in conjunction with the overarching state of slowly dying. The second manifestation of liminal in-between states comes in the form of developing physical states, namely, but not limited to, those of Dewey and Cash. While Anse’s developing inability to toothlessly eat “God’s own victuals as a man should” (Faulkner 37) represents bodily decay on a small scale, Cash’s continual use of a broken leg offers a stronger example of being on this threshold between health and infection, or physical activity and disability. Contrasting repetitive reminders of Addie’s breathing with not only the sound of Cash’s hammering of the coffin, but also the growing awareness that Cash’s infection will soon have festered up to a point at which he can no longer walk, Faulkner highlights this physical decay as a representation of liminality. Likewise, Dewey’s physical developments, as a result of pregnancy-related growth, also marks an in-between liminal state. Her thoughts, becoming increasingly more plagued by worry, despair, and frustration, reflect the slow physical development of her pregnant body, highlighting an in-between state of emotional and physical life or death that mirrors Addie’s own dying.

Employing this central motif of the liminal state in his novel As I Lay Dying, Faulkner makes use of smaller, in-between representations of liminality, as manifested in personal goals and physical states, to emphasize the build up to and impact of Addies’ death. These smaller liminal states, in conjunction with “to lay dying”, serve to highlight how complex and diverse challenges of rural life can be, where the simplicity of concepts like life and death remain the only familiar and grounding aspects of living with unpredictable tasks and developments. Death may occupy the mind, but a preoccupation with dealing with its aftermath offers a small relief from more ambiguous problems at hand.

Traced back to Addie’s neglectful attitude towards having Dewey to negate the birth of an illegitimate child, Dewey’s impulsive decisions and solitary nature cause her to have an unnatural relationship with both unexpected changes in her body and her emotions. Among these changes, Dewey’s pregnancy notably keeps her mind fixated on one goal: getting to the town doctor for an abortion. In her mind, this is the only rational solution. Her preoccupation with the body dysmorphia that follows her discovery of pregnancy, owing to God’s natural signs, and her obsession with reaching this goal clearly manifest in her behavior and daily life at home, leading her to not only disregard the death of her mother, but also grow to hate and harm Darl for wordlessly finding out about her state.

Suffering from a form of dysmorphia from a very early age, as a result of Addie’s dismissive attitude, Dewey grows up as the only daughter among a household of sons, with the sole point of reference for her emotions and bodily changes being the mother she struggles to emotionally connect to. Bearing a very basic understanding of pregnancy in mind, one which reflects the natural and impersonal process of the birth of farm animals, Dewey can only attribute feelings of frustration and disgust towards her state. On the one hand, life has taught her, through the lens of her own emotionally damaged upbringing and Addie’s detachment to her children, that childbearing isn’t a pleasant or useful life experience. On the other, all Dewey has as a point of reference for emotions and bodily functions linked to women stem from her own exploration and her experience with female farm animals. In the chapter during which the family’s cow chases Dewey, moaning to be milked, Dewey, in frustration, lectures her: “What you got in you aint nothing to what I got in me, even if you are a woman too…He could fix it alright, if he just would. And he doesn’t even know it” (Faulkner 63). Seeping into her contemplative state, even as she goes about fulfilling her everyday routine, Dewey considers all the options she has, all the while insisting on independently finding a solution. Arguably, Lafe could “fix it” if he knew, in the form of ten dollars for the doctor, as we later find out, but this isolation again reflects Dewey’s insistence on taking control of the situation like she had to take control of her life growing up, without the healthy comfort of relying on someone like a mother. Amidst a tumultuous description of uncomfortable visuals in this chapter, namely that of the dead fish seeping blood quietly, the dead air paired with the death earth and dead darkness, and that of humans as tubs of guts, Dewey’s thoughts chaotically whirl and repeat. Starting the chapter with a meditation on worry, and whether or not she, or Cash have any conception of it, she closes the chapter with much the same, with little development: “I don’t know whether I’m worrying or not. Whether I can or not. I don’t know whether I can cry or not…I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth” (Faulkner 64). Remaining confused about her emotions, it’s no surprise that her obsession with maintaining control over what she can, her confusion with that which she cannot understand, and her physical dysmorphia regarding her pregnancy, lead her to making irrational impulsive decisions, as she does when she sets Darl up for arrest, and physically beats him for finding out about her pregnancy on his own. 

In the end, all that should have held some meaning to Dewey, like maintaining a healthy relationship with her brothers, or tending to her mother in her final hours of life, didn’t. Increasingly overwhelmed by the thoughts running through her head, Dewey eventually reaches a point where her disgust towards pregnancy trumps everything else, even her own instincts of self-preservation, as she goes to the doctor and lays her life at his hands, comforted at last by the idea of reaching her goal.

In the final chapter of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, we finally see an objective presentation of the dynamics between the Gibson and Compson family through a third person omniscient narration. Not only does this present to us a fresh perspective, detached from the biases of the characters’ feelings and experiences, but it allows us to compare and contrast the influence each family has on how the household functions behind the scenes. Almost immediately, I found myself drawn to the warmth of Dilsey’s mothering care for both the Compson house and its inhabitants. In direct contrast, Faulkner depicts the house as rather bleak without her family’s presence. As a result, the cold and grey house can be seen as a symbol of decay where the Gibson family can be seen as bringers of life and warmth.

Beginning the chapter with Dilsey making her way up to the house, Faulkner introduces the morning as one that “dawned bleak and chill” with a “moving wall of grey light out of the northeast which…needled laterally into [Dilsey’s] flesh”(Faulkner, 166). Dilsey heads for the door to the house, where “the earth immediately about the door was bare” while the interior offered no further comfort, bathed in an empty, grey light. Immediately, the cold, bleak tone is set. Dilsey’s busy preparations around the house, however, soon warm up the atmosphere, and breathe new life into it. Soon enough, “the stove had begun to heat the room and to fill it with murmurous minors of the fire, and presently [Dilsey] was singing louder, as if her voice too, had been thawed out by the growing warmth”(169). In direct contrast to the warmth entertained by Dilsey, however, we hear Mrs. Compson complain at the head of the stairs: “My feet are like ice. They were so cold they waked me up”(169). As breakfast is being prepared, the other members of the household awaken and display the same level of gloom despite Dilsey’s warmth, which had already given her skin a “rich, lustrous quality”. Sitting across from each other at the breakfast table, Mrs. Compson and Jason waited “in identical attitudes; the one cold and shrewd…the other cold and querulous”(175). These direct contrasts of warmth and coldness between Dilsey and the Compsons serve to illustrate how significant her family’s presence is in keeping the household functional and alive. 

The Compson house itself takes on a deathly quality and becomes a symbol of decay in Faulkner’s descriptive narration. From within, the family could hear as the “clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself”(179). It’s no mistake that Faulkner uses such strong imagery with phrases like “dry pulse” and “decaying house” alongside descriptions of the family’s internal struggles with coldness and emotional sickness. Each of the Compson family members battles internally with a different malady, whether that be hypochondria, a mental disability, suicidal thoughts, promiscuity, or anger issues. It’s no surprise then, that the house itself radiates the same turmoil and disintegration. From the outside, Faulkner again depicts the house as decaying when the Gibsons and Benjy return from church. As they entered through the gate, “all of them looked up the drive at the square, paintless house with its rotting portico”(187). 

Furthermore, even the jaybirds surrounding the house factor into this image of death, as they circle and shriek, almost haunting the house until chased away. In the beginning of the chapter, the birds circled and shrieked until Luster picked up a rock and threw it at them, saying: “Git on back to hell, what you belong at”(168). A couple of pages later, when chaos ensues again as Jason frantically upends the contents of the lockbox and searches for the money Quentin had stolen and run off with, the jaybirds return. Just “outside the window [Jason] heard some jaybirds swirl shrieking past, and away, their circles whipping away along the wind”(178). By repeating this image of the jaybirds whenever gloom or despair is present, Faulkner draws attention to how prevalent this symbol of decay in the form of chaos is when the Gibson family isn’t actively fighting it off. As a direct parallel to Dilsey’s liveliness warming up the house, Luster brings peace by chasing the jaybirds away.

In the end, the Gibson family serve as unrelenting symbols of life amidst the coldness and decay that is the Compson house. It’s only a shame Dilsey and her family’s efforts are never recognized and acknowledged to their full potential by the Compson family. They’re often rebuked for their shortcomings, even though it’s clear the household would crumble without the Gibsons’ warmth and care.

As chaotic and non-linear as Benjy’s section seems at first, once one falls into the strange rhythm and flow of Benjy’s mind, a discernible pattern appears and paves the way for understanding the rest of the chapter. While we initially struggle to follow what appears to be a frenzied stream of consciousness that weaves in and out of the past without warning, there are two notable strategies that Faulkner utilizes to make both the passage of time and the structure of thought clearer. One is a stylistic choice in the form of italics, and the other a literary device. While the recurrence of sporadic italicized sections draws our attention to a shift in time, the repetitive use of imagery guides this transition smoothly. The two specific instances I’ll be focusing on center around Benjy’s sense of smell, touch, and sight.

In the first example, Luster and Benjy are outside by the golf course, where we see a transition into Italics mid-sentence. In an attempt to calm Benjy and stop his moaning, Luster says: “Now, git in that water and play”(Faulkner, 14), to which Benjy obediently responds: “I hushed and got in the water and Roskus came and said to come to supper and Caddy said, It’s not supper time yet. I’m not going.” Seemingly out of nowhere, Benjy has pulled us into a different memory, one where as a young boy he had played by the stream with his brothers and sister years ago. Immediately following this italics section, Benjy connects the feel of the water from the golf course to the water he felt and smelled that day with his siblings by the stream. He recalls: “Caddy was all wet and muddy behind, and I started to cry and she came and squatted in the water…Caddy smelled like trees in the rain”(15). We stay in this memory for a bit, before another italics section pulls us back into the presumed present memory. Sitting in the water by the golf course, Benjy hears: “What is the matter with you, Luster said. Can’t you get done with that moaning and play in the branch like folks”(15). Here, Faulkner’s use of “branch” to signify a stream, brings us that repetitive image of the water that serves to tie together all these jarring jumps in memory. Finally, in regular print, Benjy re-phrases the previously italicised encounter with Roskus and Caddy by recalling: “Roskus came and said to come to supper and Caddy said it wasn’t supper time yet”(15). Although chaotic at first, these transitions in time make much more sense when one focuses on these stylistic changes in print and the imagery of the smell and feel of the water that connect them.

As a second example, we could take a look at the repetition of the word “fire” across a few pages further into Benjy’s section. Appealing to Benjy’s sense of sight, and rather indirectly, touch, the section begins when Benjy finds himself back at home sitting in front of a fire Dilsey had prepared for him. Staring into the fire in front of him, Benjy pulls us into another memory of being in front of a fire. In italics, Benjy recollects: ““What you want to get her started for,” Dilsey said. “Whyn’t you keep him out of there.” “He was just looking at the fire,” Caddy said””(34). Struck again by the overwhelming nostalgia of Caddy’s absence that the memory evoked, Benjy begins to cry in the supposed current memory, where he’s sitting in front of his birthday cake. Benjy illustrates the moment, saying that “the candles went away. I began to cry. “Hush.” Luster said. “Here. Look at the fire whiles I cuts this cake””(35). Continuing to cry, Benjy pulls us back into the memory with Caddy, by means of another section of italics, where he recalls how “her head came into my lap and she was crying, holding me, and I began to cry.” It’s almost as if we’re following a literal train of thought, where an image of a fire or sense of crying bleeds into and overlaps with another of the same sort. Benjy soon draws our attention back to the cake and the fire, saying: “I ate some cake…I looked at the fire…and then the fire went away. I began to cry” (35). The parallel drawn in the almost identical phrasing of how the candles and the fire “went away” causing him to cry helps link these memories by repetitively invoking the same senses. This repetition of crying, the image of the fire, and the presence of Caddy come together as a transition intended to soften the abrupt change in time and make it more palatable.

While it’s still near impossible to follow Benjy’s sense of time in a linear manners, and some pieces of the puzzle can only be put in place after reading the accounts of the other characters, these lapses in time and transitions from memory to memory are made somewhat easier to follow when we look at the italics and repetitions of imagery in the text.