Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Impermanence of Existence and Identity
The death of Addie Bundren inspires several characters
to wrestle with the rather sizable questions of existence and identity.
Vardaman is bewildered and horrified by the transformation of a
fish he caught and cleaned into “pieces of not-fish,” and associates
that image with the transformation of Addie from a person into an
indefinable nonperson. Jewel never really speaks for himself, but
his grief is summed up for him by Darl, who says that Jewel’s mother
is a horse. For his own part, Darl believes that since the dead
Addie is now best described as “was” rather than “is,” it must be
the case that she no longer exists. If his mother does not exist,
Darl reasons, then Darl has no mother and, by implication, does
not exist. These speculations are not mere games of language and
logic. Rather, they have tangible, even terrible, consequences for
the novel’s characters. Vardaman and Darl, the characters for whom
these questions are the most urgent, both find their hold on reality
loosened as they pose such inquiries. Vardaman babbles senselessly
early in the novel, while Darl is eventually declared insane. The
fragility and uncertainty of human existence is further illustrated
at the end of the novel, when Anse introduces his new wife as “Mrs.
Bundren,” a name that, until recently, has belonged to Addie. If
the identity of Mrs. Bundren can be usurped so quickly, the inevitable
conclusion is that any individual’s identity is equally unstable.
The Tension Between Words and Thoughts
Addie’s assertion that words are “just words,” perpetually
falling short of the ideas and emotions they seek to convey, reflects
the distrust with which the novel as a whole treats verbal communication. While
the inner monologues that make up the novel demonstrate that the
characters have rich inner lives, very little of the content of these
inner lives is ever communicated between individuals. Indeed, conversations
tend to be terse, halting, and irrelevant to what the characters
are thinking at the time. When, for example, Tull and several other
local men are talking with Cash about his broken leg during Addie’s
funeral, we are presented with two entirely separate conversations.
One, printed in normal type, is vague and simple and is presumably
the conversation that is actually occurring. The second, in italics,
is far richer in content and is presumably the one that the characters
would have if they actually spoke their minds. All of the characters
are so fiercely protective of their inner thoughts that the rich
content of their minds is translated to only the barest, most begrudging
scraps of dialogue, which in turn leads to any number of misunderstandings
and miscommunications.
The Relationship Between
Childbearing and Death
As I Lay Dying is, in its own way, a
relentlessly cynical novel, and it robs even childbirth of its usual
rehabilitative powers. Instead of functioning as an antidote to
death, childbirth seems an introduction to it—for both Addie and
Dewey Dell, giving birth is a phenomenon that kills the people closest
to it, even if they are still physically alive. For Addie, the birth
of her first child seems like a cruel trick, an infringement on
her precious solitude, and it is Cash’s birth that first causes
Addie to refer to Anse as dead. Birth becomes for Addie a final
obligation, and she sees both Dewey Dell and Vardaman as reparations
for the affair that led to Jewel’s conception, the last debts she
must pay before preparing herself for death. Dewey Dell’s feelings
about pregnancy are no more positive: her condition becomes a constant
concern, causes her to view all men as potential sexual predators,
and transforms her entire world, as she says in an early section,
into a “tub full of guts.” Birth seems to spell out a prescribed
death for women and, by proxy, the metaphorical deaths of their
entire households.
