It is one of Faulkner’s most troubling titles; one returns to it again and again, trying to penetrate its mysteries—of being, surely, located, as we are, in that title, at the going out point, where all is known, finally. Addie’s monologue and the fiction generally resonate with self-mysteries (of coming into as well as going out of being and, it seems, everything in between), with the deep truths arrived at by Faulkner’s imaginative penetration of so many fictional beings. It is an eschatological title and an ontological fiction, concerned, in its very form (like The Sound and the Fury) with the creation, imagination, exploration and deep penetration of the inwardness of different beings, mediating as a fiction between the self and others, in the disguises made possible by fictions.
The whole fiction is narrated from within, and has as its principal narrator Darl, who narrates nineteen times, with regular periodicity.6 He is one of Faulkner’s major fictional penetrators of other selves. Darl, like Quentin, is one of those characters who is cursed with extraordinary powers of perception and then is destroyed (put away, here) because of them. He is a perfect example of what Norman. O. Brown (in Love’s Body) means by schizophrenic. Darl is the double seeing self, the man who knows—without mediation—all the hidden, private truths about people. One is always tempted to see him as a figure for the writer. Of all the children in the fiction, he is in some ways the one most like his mother Addie (the other knower in the novel); and like Addie, is isolated by what he knows; ironically he is the one she most completely rejects. Darl is also the other character to whom the title most obviously and disturbingly applies: Addie is put into the ground, finally, and Darl is put in a cage, in Jackson, which Vardaman says, in the true symbolic language he always uses, is “farther away than crazy” (ALD 245). At the end of the journey, Addie is interred; Darl is incarcerated: they are only dead in different ways and Darl will go on dying for many more years. The title can apply to both equally; each has the ability to see through to and speak from other worlds.
One approach to this fiction is through Addie because the title leads one so directly to her and to the section she narrates from her coffin, after she is saved from the flood by her Jewel. She is lying dying and rotting in her coffin, taking we discover (in section 40) her revenge against the living: Anse and her children—even Cash and Jewel, her treasures. And she takes her revenge by means of the very thing that betrayed her (words), binding Anse, the man incapable of action (who never sweated in his whole life) to his literal word, making him promise (give his word) to take her (Addie) back to Jefferson and bury her with her ancestors when she dies. True to his word (stupidly, stubbornly, in a kind of demonic literal-minded inversion of honor), Anse does just as he promised, so that the two parents, in different ways, work together toward the destruction of their children. We can see here that, in a whole series of reversals and inversions of the mother-function (conceiving, bring into the world and life, loving, tending, nurturing, even educating for the future), Addie is deconceiving, de-generating, destroying (killing), hating, “starving,” immobilizing (Cash, for example), driving mad (Darl), and betraying her husband and children—the family—as she lies dying. All in the name of—through Anse—decorum, propriety, burial rites (and rights), and a return to one’s ancestors. In many ways, this is surely a novel about the past killing or maiming the future. Meditating inward toward the point where Addie’s monologue provides one explanation of the funeral journey, the imagination collapses in disbelief when it comes upon the stark, brutal, conception of the family and the future which is at the center of this fiction.
As she lies dying, Addie is taking her revenge against the living for the long ago violations of, or intrusions into her inner circle of selfhood by Anse and Darl. As Addie explains in the early part of her monologue, her terrible aloneness—her virgin state—and the turbulence and restlessness (the boiling blood) that went with it, is not brought to an end when she takes Anse (or earlier, when she punishes her students in an attempt to make some kind of “blood” contact with them.) It is only brought to an end when she has Cash and realizes that living is terrible and being a mother is the answer to it. With Cash, she discovers love and for the first time experiences the blood union she has been seeking. It is Cash, not Anse, who brings her virgin state to an end because of the intensity of the direct experience of motherhood. It is Cash who violates her aloneness and in so doing makes her whole again. For the first time, she experiences real “living” and begins to understand what her father meant when he told her that living was getting ready to stay dead a long time. What her father meant is that you only live once and, as Thoreau said, you don’t want to die and come to realize that you have never really lived. Addie’s torment at the beginning of her section is her aloneness, a condition which she thinks might be brought to an end by taking Anse. But Anse, she comes to realize, is only empty words, and only intense experience, for which no words are needed, can make her alive and end her aloneness. She has this with Cash. Anse is reduced to his empty words—Anse or love, what difference did it make—and, though he does not know it, is dead to Addie. He can never be inside her circle and never be part of what she means by living.
When she discovers that she is pregnant with Darl, she thinks that she will kill Anse because he has tricked her and because he, by way of Darl, will be responsible for intruding upon the perfect relationship she has with Cash, her first experience of love and her fulfillment of herself in motherhood. Addie says that she and Cash know what love is and do not need a word for it. She rejects Darl (he is never inside her circle of selfhood) and decides that she will not kill Anse, but will take her revenge against him in such a way that he does not know she is doing it. Her revenge—the direct cause of the funeral journey that brings so much pain and suffering to the family and is the primary subject of the novel—is to make Anse promise (give his word, he being the man of empty words, like an empty door frame) that he will take her to Jefferson when she dies and bury her with her family. It is here that we encounter one of the main ambiguities of this novel. Addie says that she is going to take her revenge against Anse, but in fact her revenge turns out to be against all of her children, including the two “value” children she allows inside her circle of selfhood, Cash and Jewel. Anse alone does not suffer or lose anything during the terrible funeral journey and in fact gets both a new set of teeth and a new wife. Though Anse has given his word to Addie that he will have her buried in Jefferson, and does keep his word, we know that his main reason for continuing the funeral journey against every obstacle and all sense of decency and humanity and consideration for his children, is because he wants new teeth.
The ambiguity lies in the fact that we do not ever know if Addie—like Darl—has foreknowledge and whether, in fact, this punishment of her children was part of her motive, or an ironic consequence of it. We cannot ever really know whether the pain and suffering inflicted upon the five children by the funeral journey was really part of her revenge; but we can say, with certainty, that she is indirectly—and may be directly—responsible for it and that the two parents do in fact collaborate in bringing about the awful things that happen to the children during the journey. This is the central concern of the novel. Addie, of course, punishes Anse