At the center of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is the question of communication. The characters' methods of communication are many and vary, in some cases, depending on the characters' relationships with each other. Verbal communication is abrupt and generally devoid of particular meaning; the very value of words – the vehicle through which verbal communication moves – is questioned both explicitly and through Faulkner's nuanced semantic games. In counterpoint to the potentially problematic mode of verbal communication, more esoteric and pure forms are postulated: Darl and Dewey Dell are able to communicate notions and facts without words in something akin to telepathy; looks reveal undiluted emotional truth, and characters are occasionally able, through gaze alone, to see those around them very deeply. The question becomes: How does the novel ultimately reconcile these different modes of communication, and what light does this reconciliation shed on words and communication in general, in the world? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Conversation is rarely used to express anything of substance in As I Lay Dying, rather it is relegated to the realm of the mundane and practical. When the local men gather on the Bundrens' porch on the day of Addie's funeral, they talk not of Addie's death or the futility of Anse's proposed trip to Jefferson, but of time and Cash's downfall: You?' Armstid says,” “‘A comrade can slip quickly on wet boards,’ says Quick” (90). These lines are vacuous and uninteresting even to those involved. Faulkner contrasts what is said aloud with a text alternative in italics representative of what the speaker wishes he had expressed – mentally – at Anse's stupidity in insisting on waiting for Darl and Jewel to return with Bundren's team and not instead borrowing Tull's and Jewel's. leaving for Jefferson days earlier, before the street was flooded: “[Addie] stayed there for three days in that box, waiting for Darl and Jewel...the third day they came back...and it was already too late...'Take my team, Anse.' "We will wait for our own will" (92). It is as if there is a tacit agreement among the characters that one should not speak out loud about such matters, because doing so would violate a misplaced sense of propriety; talk only superficially about trivial and irrelevant matters he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not” (80). To fully understand his meaning, you may need to read these lines very carefully and/or more than once.) Darl is using the only tool at his disposal. to narrate his thoughts: the semantic expression. his reflections gradually become more difficult to follow: he asserts that when one begins to fall asleep, Darl concludes that, since he is awake and has not emptied himself, “…I am is” (81). He says, “Yet the wagon exists, for when the wagon has been, Addie Bundren will not be” (80). The different formulations of “being” that Darl employs here become so complicated and loaded with meaning and double entendre that they cease to mean anything and become self-reflexive. The focus is as much on the transmutations of the verb as on the suggested meanings; one wonders whether the meanings are actually so abstract as to notno longer have any worldly application or referent. Faulkner uses Darl's penchant for metaphysical reflection to draw attention to the fragility of words: the form of being can only mean and suggest so much before falling completely apart. Because of this, Darl cannot render his thoughts very clearly; language is its limit. Addie Bundren, the matriarch of the Bundren family, has a deep distrust of words. She is offended by words like “fear,” “motherhood,” “pride” – “I knew fear was invented by someone who had never been afraid” (172). The word itself is meaningless, superfluous: all words, even love, are “just a form of filling a gap… when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for [love] any more than out of pride or fear" (172). She knew that Anse didn't really love her because he used that word. “Love” is a form of filling a lack: Anse lacked the real feeling, the real sensation that love meant, and so he used the word in an attempt to disguise it; using the word is therefore, in effect, a mode of deception. Addie and his son Cash, his first child, did not need to use the word: the feeling was significant enough ideas about the naming - formulation - of feelings and their inherent meaninglessness are comparable to his understanding of the names of human beings: The name of Anse or Cash or Darl, once meditated on for a while, dissolves and becomes a form, an empty container for the person it signifies – this container meaningless when separated from its referent, and therefore without intrinsic meaning. “It doesn't matter what they call them,” Addie says (173). Samson, a man who shelters the Bundrens for a night, thinks of a man he knows, MacCullum, but whose name he cannot remember: "Damn, the name is right on the tip of my tongue" (113). This is a man with whom she has “traded off and on for twelve years,” who she has known “from boyhood upwards” – “But damn if [he] can say his name” (119). knowledge of the signified – in this case a living, breathing human being – and the signifier – the name of that human being: knowledge of the name does not necessarily indicate knowledge of the man, and for the same reason one can know the man without knowing his name. The name is an abstraction, the concrete thing – its human referent – ​​is an object of value and meaning. Because the characters in As I Lay Dying are hostile to language and names (things used to communicate verbally in the world), to non-verbal language, communication is the preferred method by which feelings – and secrets – are expressed. “I always had the idea that [Darl] and Dewey Dell knew something between each other,” Cash says. Darl knows that Dewey Dell was impregnated, but he hasn't told anyone. The novel assumes that this type of communication has more value than verbal communication: the non-verbal, almost telepathic, connection they use to communicate has constant veracity whereas the information conveyed through verbal communication is subject to human error and general subjectivity . This mode circumvents issues of fairness and fear that might inspire attempts to occlude the truth. Dewey Dell says, “…and then I saw Darl and he knew it. He said he knew it without words, just as he told me that Mom was dying without words, and I knew he knew it because if he had said he knew it with words I wouldn't have believed he had been there and seen us" ( 27 ).Dewey Dell affirms the authenticity of telepathic communication. She only knows that Darl actually knows about her sexual encounter with Lafe and subsequent pregnancy because of the wordless method by which he communicated it to him. She, like her mother,distrust words; people can use words to lie and deceive. His bond with Darl, however, supersedes things like that: it's a sophisticated method of communication, unaffected by human fallibility; operates on a higher plane. The eye is a motif in As I Lay Dying; it is a vehicle for the truthful nonverbal communication of impressions, thoughts and feelings. Gazes, glances, and flashes of life and color convey meaning more truthfully and holistically than language. Almost every page of the novel, regardless of who narrates it, is studded with allusions to the characters' eyes: "pale rigidity of his eyes" (128), "his eyes are gasping" (132), "his eyes, life in they suddenly rush upon them” (48). The gaze has the power to reveal feelings in a distilled and simplified manner. Dewey Dell has specific reasons for needing to go to the city, and Samson's attempts to force Anse to give up the trip infuriate her: “...and then I found that girl looking at me. If his eyes had been guns, I wouldn't be talking now” (115). “…I hadn’t done anything to her at all that I knew of,” Samson says; although I can't understand why his gaze conveys so much anger, his eyes absolutely betray his feelings. Darl's eyes – his gaze – Tull theorizes, are what “gets people talking” about him; they are the real culprits of his achieving the status of “other” within the community. “I always say it was never so much what he did or said or anything as the way he looked at you” (125). Darl's gaze then communicated something to those he came into contact with, some part of himself became evident through his way of looking. What is communicated, however, is unexpected and disturbing. The eyes are the window onto a person, the space through which one must pass to access another human being; therefore, the significance of the gaze in As I Lay Dying is immense. Through their respective gazes, Darl and Cash are able to connect in this way: “...he and I look at each other with long, inquisitive gazes, gazes that dive unobstructed through each other's eyes and into the ultimate secret place where for an instant [we] crouch flagrantly and imperturbably…alert, secretive, and unashamed” (142). The two are “shameless” at this moment; they are in a supernatural and complete communication – a communication in which words play no role – and through it they achieve a kind of peace. Tull says that Darl's way of looking is "as if he has somehow gotten inside you" (125). What is disturbing then is that the person seen will enter into a kind of involuntary (and unfamiliar) communication in which Darl is able to see and understand that individual in a, perhaps, disturbingly complete way. Language is an imperfect means of expression: under its restrictions, emotions and humans are reduced to abstract signs (words and names respectively), and complicated ideas often fail to be adequately brought to fruition, superficial signs collapsing beneath the weight of the levels and nuances of ideas. The people who populate the novel (the Bundrens, the Tulls, the various neighbors and others) have no great respect for the spoken word work, their conversations reflecting this in their terseness and general irrelevance. The characters' instinct is that it is inappropriate to talk about certain things in certain contexts (this sense of ownership is part of a unique code of the cultural mores of the American South that Faulkner draws inspiration from) and, even with the mastery and willingness to use language, for certain things, is decidedly insufficient. To counteract the reductive and defective mode of conventional verbal communication, other modes are presented.