English 104 - Introduction to Narrative
The Power of Denial
The Power of Denial
Category: 2 Essay: Carroll, Twain, Faulkner, Sebold | Liz Button
Liz Button
Professor Phillipson
Intro to the Narrative
The Power of Denial
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner are each constructed as platforms for narrators that have a case to make for themselves. Susie’s desire for vindication in her death motivates her to overstate the positive results left in the wake if her death, while each narrator in As I Lay Dying endeavor to excuse their inattention to Addie in her lifetime. Positive thinking subverts the credibility of the narrators in As I Lay Dying more than in The Lovely Bones since As I Lay Dying contains Addie’s soliloquy to contradict the various narrators, a condemnation from the dead citing evidence from life. In the case of Susie, it is merely her relentless optimism that discredits some of her positive attestations, as one sees the actions of the living left behind confirm more often than not Susie’s belief that she can “change the lives of those [she] loved on Earth” (20).
Susie Salmon feels supremely helpless in the preliminary stages of her afterlife; her every motion to communicate with her family is frustrated by the isolation of heaven. “All I could do was talk,” Susie says, “but no one on earth could hear me” (32). She yearns to communicate with her family, to tell them that she is okay, to help them get over her death, to find the man who murdered her; but her desire is thwarted by heaven’s remoteness. However, very soon after voicing this desire to connect, Susie admits hopefully that, “The truth was that the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred” (48). Telling this to herself has the dual purpose of improving her quality of life in heaven but also diminishing her credibility as a narrator. At one point, she herself even questions her own notions of posthumous interaction with her family. “Had my brother really seen me somehow,” Susie wonders when Buckley claims to Nate that Susie comes to visit him, “or was he merely a little boy telling beautiful lies?” (95)
Susie is obsessed with her condition as one of the dead. She desires to know, ultimately, what the purpose is for her having died. She hopes that eventually her condition will be validated in some way, and one of these ways, in her mind, is to positively affect the lives of her survivors. However, it is true that the way Susie narrates distort the significance of her effect on occurrences after her death. Susie notes the momentous changes in her sister, how she goes from merely hardening herself to all human compassion that tried to reach her from the outside to “becoming everything all at once. A woman. A spy. A jock. The Ostracized: One Man Alone” (176). She cites how her mother wants desperately to return to California, but stays with the family instead. At the end of the novel, Susie describes everyone seated around the table, saying, “These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone…The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life” (320). Susie wonders at the strength of her sister and at the bravery of her mother and at the new and potent connections that have grown with the passage of time after her murder. She credits her death with these miraculous changes and strong bonds that are created, but, being unwaveringly optimistic, she does not entertain the idea that these positive changes would have been affected if she had lived. Lending credence to this possibility would destroy Susie and debunk her theory of the lovely bones of familial connection that had come as payment for the price of her life.
Susie’s wishful thinking leads her to think that the world to revolve around her, albeit posthumously. “No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth,” (231) Susie says. It is true that no one could have predicted how her loss could change her family and friends, but this is not enough to validate her death. This is evident from the countless other rapes and deaths of young women and girls by Mr. Harvey or other sexual predators who do not get a chance to tell their stories; Susie is not able to help them, although she desires to. In watching the lives of those left on Earth, Susie sees these “living, breathing women. Sometimes I saw the wounded-those who had been beaten by husbands or raped by strangers, children raped by their fathers-and I would wish to intervene somehow” (272). It is Susie’s belief that she can intervene when it comes to situations of dire need; for example, when Lindsey tries to enter Mr. Harvey’s house to find proof of Susie’s murder, says that “[she] was straining so hard on the Inbetween [she] thought she might hurt Lindsey when [she] was trying to help” (130).
While Susie strains to convince herself as well as the reader that she is able to affect the lives of those she left on Earth, each character in As I Lay Dying is also motivated in their narration by wishful thinking. They desire to claim innocence of any cruelty or neglect visited upon Addie during her life, thereby exonerating themselves. However, this positive thinking warps their credibility as narrators. When Darl narrates the incident involving Jewel and his mysterious disappearances during the night, he makes an insightful comment that also be regarded when examining the body of narratives as a whole.
“It was as though,” Darl says, “so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside” (134).
The treachery each narrator is perpetrating is the cowardice of rejecting responsibility for the pain they may have put Addie through during their lifetimes. It is unfair to Addie, since she is dead and cannot defend herself. However the reader is served with Addie’s point of view in the middle of the novel.
Even Darl, who is most insightful when it comes to human behavior, falls prey to this trap of creating excuses for the fact that he did not love his mother during his lifetime. He uses negative imagery to describe Jewel’s appearance as unemotional and apathetic in regard to his mother’s death, noting his “pale eyes like wood set into hid wooden face” (4). However, it is apparent that Darl is the one who possesses the cold and loveless heart. One sees the hypocrisy in his statement: “I cannot love my mother because I have no mother. Jewel’s mother is a horse” (95). He tries to justify not loving his mother by citing her adultery and her resulting preference for Jewel, a fault of his mother that he can see through his second sight. Nevertheless, his tricks of semantics do not mask the fact that he is not the angel of compassion that Cora sees him as.
Cora herself is the most sanctimonious character in the novel, and it follows that her narration is the most blatantly hypocritical of the bunch. She describes her attention to Addie during her sickness with false modesty, stating that “for the last three weeks I have been coming over every time I could…so that…she would not have to face the great unknown without one familiar face to give her courage. Not that I deserve credit for it; I will expect the same for myself” (22). Even her own husband, Tull, cites her tendency to try to project virtue and well-meaning intent; “though sometimes I think that Cora’s a mite over-cautious,” he says, “like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else” (71).
Anse is, however, the most obvious narrator when it comes to endeavoring to excuse his neglect of Addie during her lifetime. An internal guilty conscience is apparent in him throughout the book, especially when he introduces the new Mrs. Bundren to his children “with that kind of daresome and hangdog look all at once when he has been up to something he knows ma ain’t going to like” (260). Anse insists repeatedly throughout the novel that he tried to do everything as Addie “would wish it,” trying to convince himself that by bringing Addie to her burial site, he will be negating whatever wrongs he did her in her lifetime. However, he repeatedly denies the obvious fact that being buried in Jefferson is not enough to rectify the fact that Addie did not have a happy life.
Dewey Dell’s narrative is also a very obviously an excuse for neglect toward the living and apathy toward the dead. “I heard that my mother is dead,” she says, “I wish I had time to let her die…It is because in the wild and outraged earth too soon too soon too soon. It’s not that I wouldn’t and will not it’s that it is too soon too soon too soon” (120). Dewey Dell knows that she has too much on her mind in regard to her own dilemma of getting the abortion she wants so ardently to think about her mother. It pains her to think that all she could give to the woman who raised her was that initial wail of despair, but in order for her to keep on living as she did before, she must go to every length to have an abortion, even if it means betraying Darl and revealing his burning of the barn, or keeping the money she earns a secret from her family. Dewey Dell, in her own harried narrative voice, explains both her desire and her remorse in not being able to truly mourn her mother, and this makes her one of the more honest and respectable characters in the novel.
In the middle of the novel, the reader finally hears from the dead woman that every character had been judging posthumously. It is here that Addie renders her judgment upon them all, rejecting the judgments they have made about her and the excuses they have conjured to exonerate themselves of neglect or abuse toward her in her lifetime. It is Addie’s commentary that negates the excuses of every character; she defends herself against Cora’s idealized accounts of their conduct toward her, Anse’s blame of the boys for delaying her burial and applauding of himself for following her wish to be buried in Jefferson, and Darl’s self-righteous justification for not loving his mother. She states that she has never trusted words, and that actions were what she saw as the only potent tool to accomplish anything. With one broad statement, she debunks the personal arguments of every character in the novel. “Because people to whom sin is just a matter of words,” she states posthumously, “to them salvation is just words too” (176). In the characters’ endeavors to save themselves from remorse and blame from others, they narrate the journey to Jefferson, excusing every action of their own and citing every failure of others to properly mourn Addie. It is this form of narration that is not to be trusted; it is ironic that the narration that is the most nonsensical is also the most genuine-that of Vardaman, who is so scarred by his mother’s death that he cannot make logical sense of it.
In The Lovely Bones, Susie’s optimism is pervasive; she tries to convince herself of her ability to affect the lives of the living from the remote confines of heaven, while As I Lay Dying’s narrators try to escape their guilt by narrating their way out of it, throwing out blame and self-defense with every statement made. However, it is the appearance of Addie in the middle of As I Lay Dying that discredits the narrators, proving all their denial of the sins of their past to be in vain. Susie, however, with no intervening force, will continue thinking her death is validated by “the lovely bones” formed in the wake of her murder. Either way, the bridge that divides this life and the afterlife is hard to cross. It is only the reader who can truly see both sides of the story, who can truly hear the words spoken from the living’s mouth as well as the dead’s.
Posted by ebutton on December 15, 2003 at 04:11 PM