The Dead

I was confused at first. Death was only thrown around at the beginning seemingly haphazardly. It was only mentioned, but when the final parts came, death and lots of thoughts of death/the dead came up very quick. I'm still confused with the characters and the focal points and why all of the beforehand is necessary, especially when the ending seems to be the only real important part. I don' believe that many of the other characters where necessary for the ending which is why I'm curious as to why they were even included/who they are.  Lily and some of the guests, for instants. Joyce went into detail about many of them, yet by the end it seems that only a select few are even mentioned.

Word

cross-examination

Question

What would the issue be with Gabriel being a "West Briton"? Does it mean that he is of a higher education?

Anse

I don’t get Anse. I just don’t. He’s either a complete idiot or a willful one about his wife, demands to be self sustaining even though he has nothing, and when he tries to be self sustaining, he takes from his own family because he literally is to stupid and poor to barter with his own tools and possessions. He takes pride in the fact that he got his own mules, yet technically they were never his to own since the reason he got them was Jewel’s horse. I also understand that this may be a gap in the time period and thinking, but what is his problem with Dewey Dell and the money? All that she has tried to do is help and actually be self sustaining (unlike Anse’s false sense of his own self-sustainability) and he takes the money from her, saying it’s on a loan (and I will bet, from his personality and economic situation and personal experience that he will not pay her back). Ten dollars is quite a bit of money in that time! Anse ‘s tools were not worthy forty dollars to probably buy three or four mules. He- a ‘self-sustaining man’ would not sell his tools to pay back his daughter. I don’t get why he acts as though they should be grateful! He literally thought it’d be a good idea to fix Cash’s leg with cement. He has no teeth, a hump, and his wife cheated on him. He should consider himself lucky his children (and Jewel) don’t leave him for dead if not kill him themselves.

Darl's Condition

Throughout this book I've been wondering what exactly is Darl's condition. For a while I though it may be a hero or superiority complex (his was of speaking and Cash's description of his actions with the barn), but now I think he may have Dissociative Identity Disorder.
I think for a while he did a very good job of hiding this disorder, but maybe this is the purpose of the italics. It may be Darl's multiple identities leaking through to the other characters. It could make sense. We already thought that the italics were to show his omniscience, but Faulkner also italicizes Darl's section. The italics could have been when he was keeping these multiple identities hidden. There are no italics post-train ride and Darl refers to himself as two different people. "Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train...'What are you laughing at?' I said" (253).  Since this is one of the final three chapters and it's incredibly disoriented, maybe it's when his  Dissociative Identity Disorder comes full circle and is finally exposed.

AILD Word

horse

AILD- Aposiopesis

AP Latin is currently translating Vergil's Aeneid in class. In translating we have passed a scene where Neptune cuts off his sentence and just carries over to another note. It weird, annoying, and something I thought I might only ever have to see in that class due to the way latin can be grammatically ordered, but I stand corrected. Of course, Faulkner would find a way to further annoy his poor reader with his style. Now, this technique - called aposiopesis- is when a speaker just cuts off their sentence due to frustration beyond words. When aposiopesis shows up in Vergil it is when Neptune is so angered that our class translated the line as " Whom I- but it is better to..." This frustration is present in Cash. After repeatedly noting how it will not balance, his chapter literally ends "If they want it to tote and ride on a balance, they will have" (96).

I just think it's interesting that this cutting off of the sentence- for whatever reason (maybe it's just more stream-of-consciousness oddity rather than aposiopesis)- shows up in a modernist novel, which is incredibly different from the epic it was found in.