Jessica Werner-DeLong

Darl and the Depiction of Trauma in As I Lay Dying

Jessica Werner-DeLong

English 498 – Dr. Eurie Dahn

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, depicts the journey of the Bundren family on their quest to bury its matriarch in the nearby town of Jefferson. The second-oldest son, Darl, initially seems to be one of the sanest members of the characteristically selfish and dysfunctional family, due to his seemingly objective and literary descriptions of the events in his narrative sections. But Faulkner provides many clues throughout the novel, such as the townspeople’s reactions to his unnerving stares and strange behaviors, which suggest that Darl may not be as straightforward as he may seem, long before his apparent mental breakdown in the conclusion of the text. Faulkner also depicts Darl as a veteran, though the revelation of this information is not made explicit until one of the final sections of the novel, when Darl mentions a “little spy-glass he got in France at the war” (254). After he burns the barn containing his mother’s corpse, the central question of the text, for both the other characters and the readers, becomes, “Is Darl insane?” I argue that Faulkner does not depict the character as traditionally “insane,” but rather as a veteran who has significant untreated trauma from his experiences in World War I. Faulkner develops Darl’s character using various techniques throughout his sections of the novel, which are written in stream-of-consciousness-- an overreliance on facts, a lack of emotional language, and his alleged clairvoyant abilities all provide evidence for Darl’s traumatized mental state throughout the novel. An understanding of Faulkner’s depiction of Darl’s trauma is central to the novel as a whole, since the question of Darl’s insanity is at the heart of the text. Many texts written under the tradition of modernism in the 1920s and ‘30s focused on the aftermath of World War I, including As I Lay Dying, as, the effects of the Great War were unprecedented in history.. One such effect was the phenomenon of soldiers seeming to “bring the war back with them” after returning home. The condition was coined “shell-shock,” because it was initially believed to be directly caused by exposure to an exploding shell during the war, rather

than as a general reaction to trauma (Stagner 256). Veterans who returned home with the condition experienced a range of symptoms, including “exhaustion, palpitations, shortness of breath, tremor, joint and muscle pain, dizziness, and headache, together with nightmares, persistent anxiety, and difficulty sleeping” (Jones and Wessely 1708). The term “shell-shock,” which was formally recognized for the first time following World War I, became a bit of a catchall for the vast array of physical and mental difficulties that veterans experienced. In the century following the Great War, psychologists’ understanding of the effects of trauma has expanded significantly, and the origins of shell-shock have transformed into the more specific contemporary definitions of PTSD. However, at the time that many modernist texts were written in the early 1900s, the ideas of trauma were just starting to form in the public consciousness and the specifics of shell-shock were still largely speculative, so it is no surprise that the condition became a recurring theme in many texts of the period. In her essay “Healing the Soldier, Restoring the Nation: Representations of Shell Shock in the USA During and After the First World War,” Annessa C. Stagner provides an overview of how shellshock was viewed in the period during and immediately following the war, which will be helpful in our consideration of how As I Lay Dying fit within the national conversation about the condition during the period. The term shell-shock was first used in a British newspaper to describe the condition that was plaguing British soldiers during and after their time in the war (Stagner 256). It was from Britain that the term eventually became adopted in America to describe similar phenomena happening to American veterans. Unlike in Britain, American views of shell-shock tended to focus on the condition as a temporary, curable injury of war, instead of as a chronic condition. Stagner writes, “American psychiatrists boasted that, unlike their European counterparts, they were prepared for shell shock cases” (258). This idea of shell-shock as a curable condition spilled over into the depictions of shell-shock in the American media-- film, print media, music, and other representations of the condition all tended to depict shell-shock as a war injury that could be cured. Treatments for the condition, described in various newspapers and print media from the period, included breathing exercises, relaxation in yellow-painted rooms (as opposed to blue- or red-painted rooms), music, “country life and farming,” occupational therapy, and religious faith (Stagner 262). In light of our contemporary understanding of trauma, it is clear that most of these treatments were not founded on any true psychological basis; but the idea of shell-shock as curable persisted. Female care from mothers and wives was also viewed as an essential ingredient to the

healing of distressed male veterans, and letters sent to soldiers abroad was seen as a preventative measure against their development of the condition (Stagner 263). By the time that As I Lay Dying was published in 1930, the continued presence of shell-shock symptoms in American veterans was just beginning to incite questions about whether or not the condition was really as curable as once believed (Stagner). Although shell-shocked soldiers were thought to have a temporary injury, and not a permanent psychological disorder, that did not stop many of them from ending up in institutions and insane asylums. As John R. Sutton writes, “Madness was an elastic status that could be applied to persons whose major problem was poverty, homelessness, or physical disability … Most asylum referrals originated from families who, for a variety of circumstantial reasons, found themselves unable to tolerate or provide care for a troublesome family member” (667). Faulkner’s depiction of Darl being ambushed by his family and taken to an asylum would not have been outlandish in 1930, when the number of individuals sent to such asylums was growing rapidly (Sutton). Although “shell-shock” was first recognized following World War I, trauma is now understood as something that has always been a part of the human experience in response to distressing events; and as such, it has been depicted in literary texts that stretch further back in human history than the Bible. According to Cathy Caruth, a literary theorist who examined the way in which trauma is depicted in narratives, trauma often represents a “double wound”: the pain from both the initial traumatizing experience, and the pain that comes from reexperiencing the event over and over again. She writes, “… So trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance— returns to haunt the survivor later on” (11). This suggests that, because the traumatic event is so significant for the individual who experiences it, he or she cannot fully incorporate that event into their normal consciousness. Caruth also argues that, interspersed with these periods of reexperiencing, individuals who have experienced significant trauma also undergo periods of latency in which the traumatic event lies dormant in their consciousness. She writes, “The experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of a reality that can hence never be fully known, but in an inherent latency within the experience itself. The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all” (19). These theories suggest that the experience of an individual with

shell-shock might alternate between the periods of latency and reexperiencing, but that the trauma is always, in some way, affecting the sufferer because the traumatic event can never be fully assimilated into that person’s consciousness. Literary theorists Bessel A. van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane also offer insight on how to understand trauma in literature. Two points are particularly noteworthy as they relate to As I Lay Dying. The first is that individuals who have experienced trauma often engage in “compulsive reexposure … to situations reminiscent of the trauma” (van der Kolk and McFarlane 493). Although sufferers will often do their best to consciously avoid anything that reminds them of the trauma, they also often experience a compulsion towards situations, places, events, and people that remind them of the trauma. A common example of this would be an individual who was abused by a parental figure, who then enters into romantic relationships later in life with individuals who are subtly similar to their previous abuser. This compulsive reexperiencing is often inherently harmful for the individual with trauma (van der Kolk and McFarlane 494). Although Faulkner does not reveal any specifics about the nature of Darl’s traumatic past, the potential connection between the violence of the war and Darl’s decision to burn down the barn cannot be overlooked. The second noteworthy point is that, as a means of avoiding thoughts of the trauma while in the latency stage, individuals with PTSD often struggle with fantasizing, since those types of thoughts can quickly become unsafe. They write, “When traumatized people allow themselves to fantasize, this creates the danger of breaking down their barriers against being reminded of the trauma. In order to prevent this from happening, they become constricted and seem to organize their lives around not feeling and not considering options for the best ways of responding to emotionally arousing problems” (496). Since As I Lay Dying is written in a stream-of-consciousness, Faulkner reveals that Darl almost never engages in that type of fantasy-thought. In fact, Darl is characteristic for his apparent objectivity in the sections of the novel that he narrates, suggesting that there is a relationship between Darl’s narrative style and his previous trauma from the war. Current literary scholarship focusing on Darl in As I Lay Dying has tended to focus on either the way in which Faulkner has written his sections of stream of consciousness or the way in which Darl’s trauma and alleged “insanity” manifest themselves within the text. For example, Michel Delville argues that Darl’s tendency to speak and think in similes is representative of his sense of alienation, while Homer B. Pettey argues that the distinction between “being” and “saying” in the novel is representative of Darl’s insanity because he

cannot recognize that his perceptions do not always indicate reality. Dorothy J. Hale argues that Darl, in his own narrative sections of the text, attempts to completely differentiate between his “public” and “private” selves, and that Darl’s alleged breakdown at the novel’s conclusion is a result of his inability to continue hiding his “private” self. Other critics, such as Charles Palliser, have argued that Darl’s clairvoyance is representative of his belief in predestination. In their respective essays, Zackary Tevlin, Kathryn Olsen, Eunju Hwang, and Charles Hannon all consider the effect of Faulkner’s language and word choice in Darl’s narrative sections of the text in relation to the question of his insanity. While it is true that Darl’s unique narrative style and clairvoyance are linked to the question of his insanity in the text, I argue that the distinctive choices that Faulkner makes in Darl’s narrative sections are directly related to Darl’s unresolved trauma from the war.

Darl is both the first character to narrate a section of the novel, as well as the character who narrates the most sections, so his voice is arguably one of the most important in the text. Faulkner begins the novel by depicting a scene of Darl and Jewel walking home, written in Darl’s voice. He writes:

Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.

The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laidby cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision. (3)

From these opening lines, two trends in Darl’s narrative style become immediately apparent, both of which persist throughout his sections of the novel. The first is that Darl describes the scene with immense precision in his language, though the apparent precision contains clues to his unreliability as a narrator. He cites the exact number of feet that he is walking ahead of Jewel, despite the fact that he would have no way of knowing that the distance between them was precisely fifteen feet. Darl also uses geometric language to describe the shape of the path, stating that the path travels around the cotton house at “four soft right angles.” The mathematical language suggests that Darl is

objective and accurate in his description, but his credibility is undermined by considering the entirety of the phrase; Faulkner writes, “it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles.” It is humorous that Darl suggests that the path both forms a circle around the cottonhouse as well as a series of right angles, which is a mathematical contradiction. These opening lines show that although Faulkner uses objective language to write in Darl’s voice, the character might be less precise than it appears on the surface. The second trend that becomes apparent from the opening lines is that Faulkner also uses poetic, descriptive language when writing as Darl. The imagery of Jewel’s “frayed and broken straw hat,” the simile of the path running “straight as a plumb-line,” and the alliteration of the phrase “baked brick-hard by July” are all techniques that could come straight from a creative writing textbook. This descriptive language, paired with the long, flowing syntax of the sentences, suggests that Darl is a sensitive, emotional character. But that observation proves suspect as well, when it is considered that Darl does not describe his emotions at all in the opening section of the novel. Darl simply describes the setting and the characters’ actions as he sees them, but he does not provide any direct insight into how he feels about them. This, too, is a trend that persists throughout the entirety of the novel; Darl does not pass judgement on most of the details that he describes, but the reader must read between the lines to get a sense of his true feelings. For example, the fact that he is walking a whole fifteen feet ahead of Jewel, a seemingly far distance, suggests that there is tension between the two characters, even though Darl does not explicitly say so. These two trends provide insight into Faulkner’s depiction of Darl’s psychology. I argue that Darl’s insistence on precision in his descriptions shows that he uses language as an attempt to gain control over his environment. Although he cannot possibly know how far away Jewel is, his claim that Jewel is behind him by exactly fifteen feet allows him to have a comforting sense of control over an otherwise unpredictable setting. After experiencing the horrors of war and having an intimate understanding of how unpredictable the world can be, Darl’s thoughts reveal that he avoids the uncertainty that comes with “not knowing” as often as possible. Secondly, Darl’s refusal to directly state his emotions, and to instead hint about his emotional state through the use of descriptive prose, appears to be a manifestation of his trauma. As discussed earlier, individuals with significant trauma often feel unsafe when fantasizing or having emotional thoughts (van der Kolk and McFarlane 496), so Darl’s insistence on simply describing the

here-and-now, objective facts of the situation appears to be a coping mechanism for him. As many critics have pointed out, Darl’s mental health appears to rapidly decline as the novel progresses, which corresponds with the fact that the prose of his narrative sections becomes increasingly incoherent until his eventual breakdown at the end of the text. It can be inferred that the death of his mother, and the subsequent stress of the family trip to Jefferson, is the catalyst that triggers the resurgence of his trauma from the period of latency that he is in at the beginning of the novel. Faulkner first hints at Darl’s traumatic past during a scene in which he struggles to fall asleep while on the journey to Jefferson. In a rambling series of philosophical sentences, Darl contemplates his existence using forms of the verb “is.” Faulkner writes, “In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not” (80). These musings continue for over a page, which is followed by a separate paragraph that is only one sentence long; Faulkner writes, “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home” (81). The abrupt stylistic shift between the dense, philosophical language in the preceding paragraph and the more descriptive prose in the final sentence suggests that Darl’s train of thought changes rapidly. The unusual sleeping arrangements on the trip to Jefferson appear to be a trigger that reminds Darl of his time in the war, where he likely slept in many unusual and dangerous locations. Darl’s inability to contain his thoughts within the precise, objective language that he uses to describe his philosophical ideas is a hint that Darl may be undergoing an intrusive symptom of his trauma at the conclusion of this section. This is a logical time for Faulkner to depict a reemergence of Darl’s symptoms, as it is well-known that sleep is one area with which many sufferers of PTSD have particular difficulty, due to the frequency of reexperiencing that occurs in nightmares during sleep. To return to Caruth’s ideas about trauma, the period of latency that Darl had been experiencing thus far in the novel has been broken, and he has now shifted back to the stage of reexperiencing. One of the unique features of Darl’s narrative style is his apparent ability to know things about which he was not directly present. Scholars have differing views on the meaning of this alleged clairvoyance, but I argue that it is also a feature of his reaction to the past trauma. The scene in which this clairvoyance is most prevalent is Faulkner’s depiction of Addie’s death. Addie’s death is written from

Darl’s point of view, despite the fact that Darl and Jewel are away on a job. Faulkner switches back and forth between seemingly objective descriptions of Addie’s death scene and descriptions of Darl and Jewel on the job. The obvious question is how Darl can narrate a scene for which he is not present, and while that could not happen in reality, Faulkner uses this alleged supernatural ability to draw attention to Darl’s unique way of coping with the world after his trauma. I argue that Darl is not really clairvoyant and could not truly know the specifics of what had happened back home, but that this seeming? ability is the result of two things. First, as discussed at length previously, Darl fills in the gaps of things that he does not know by inventing seemingly objective, factual details, which is likely due to the fact that the unknown is synonymous with the unsafe for him. He narrates the details of Addie’s dying breath, Cash’s horrified shock, Dewey Dell’s feigned emotionality, Vardaman’s quiet escape, and Anse’s awkward fumbling because it is better to invent the scene himself than to admit that he does not know what happened. Secondly, Darl’s elaborate, descriptive prose suggests that he spends much time observing the world and other people, and so his descriptions are quite true to how his family members would behave in such a situation. It almost does not matter whether Darl truly “saw” his mother’s death through some supernatural clairvoyance or not, since his observational powers allow him to piece together the missing details with exceptional accuracy anyway. By not focusing on his own emotional reactions to the events of his life, Darl is able to hone in on his observational skills, which allow him to better cope with the horrors of his trauma. Darl eventually decides to burn down the barn in an attempt to bring the family journey to an immediate end. Using Darl’s narrative voice, Faulkner writes, “Against the dark doorway, he seems to materialise out of darkness, lean as a racehorse in his underclothes in the beginning of the glare. He leaps to the ground with on his face an expression of furious unbelief. He has seen me without even turning his head or his eyes in which the glare swims like two small torches” (218). Though Darl does not explicitly state that he has burned down the barn, Faulkner provides several clues to allow the reader to deduce what had happened. Darl describes the fire using the phrase “the beginning of the glare.” When paired with the imagery of Jewel entering the scene in “furious unbelief,” the reader first assumes that Faulkner uses the word “glare” to mean “a fierce or piercing look” (Oxford English Dictionary). It seems as though Jewel is glaring at his half-brother for some crime that is still unknown to the reader. On the second reading, however, it becomes clear that Faulkner uses the word “glare” quite differently in this passage, to mean “dazzling brilliance

(of a light, fire, sun, etc.); a strong fierce light” (Oxford English Dictionary). Faulkner instead uses the word to create the imagery of Jewel, appearing majestically against the backdrop of fire. Faulkner intentionally uses the double meaning of the word “glare” to provide ambiguity about the scene taking place, which aligns with Darl’s apparent motive to keep his role in the fire hidden. Although Darl describes the scene using his characteristic objective language and descriptive prose, this double meaning provides a clue that Darl is not really recounting the scene objectively. Faulkner completes the simile by comparing the “glare” in Jewel’s eyes to “two small torches.” This again seems like a classic instance of Darl using literary language to compare his half-brother’s anger to a raging fire, when in reality, he is simply recounting the image of the fire that is probably quite literally reflected in Jewel’s eyes. As stated earlier, individuals who have experienced trauma often behave in ways that are impulsive or reminiscent of their previous trauma, and while we do not know whether Darl encountered any fire during the war, it is likely that his sudden act of arson is reminiscent of the violence and danger that is characteristic of all wars. Darl knows that his involvement in the fire would likely cause him to be labeled as “insane” by the other characters, so Faulkner uses many such narrative techniques to obscure his role in the event throughout the section. Faulkner depicts the eventual mental breakdown of Darl in the concluding sections of the novel. In this scene, Darl’s past as a veteran becomes most clear to the reader, due to the reference to the “little spyglass he got in France at the war” (254). Almost more striking than the reveal of Darl’s war history, however, is the breakdown of Darl’s characteristic expressive prose. Faulkner writes:

Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed. ‘What are you laughing at?’ I said. ‘Yes yes yes yes yes.’” (253).

The scene continues with several more references to Darl, laughing and repeating the word “yes,” and referring to himself in third-person. Although Faulkner shows that Darl has lost his capacity for cohesive narration and rich description, the scene also represents a more positive shift for the character. For one of the first times in the novel, Darl either cannot or chooses not to conceal his emotions, laughing for the entirety of the section. Although he does not articulate the reasons for his laughter, possibly because he is so unaccustomed to the language of emotions, he acknowledges and accepts the laughter, saying “yes yes

yes yes yes.” He does not repeat the word “no,” which would signify that a part of him still denies the emotional response, but he repeats the word “yes.” In many ways, this lack of explanation and articulation about his laughter actually shows that he is more in touch with his emotions than it would if Faulkner had provided an explicit reason. As literary theorist Jacques Lacan describes in his famous essay, “The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I,” young children who are preverbal have an idealized sense of their own identity that is made complete by recognizing their image in the mirror. It is the eventual acquisition of language that distorts this sense of identity as children grow up (Lacan). Darl’s apparent regression to a more primitive form of language, represented by the repetition of the word “yes,” shows that he has, in some ways, moved closer towards that more idealistic version of himself and his identity. I argue that this shows that he is closer to the primitive experience of emotion than he could be if Faulkner had written the scene using more elaborate descriptions and explanations. To return to Cathy Caruth’s ideas of trauma as a double wound that the survivor is unable to assimilate into their psyche, this scene shows that Darl is finally beginning the process of assimilating his traumatic past by allowing himself to feel and acknowledge his emotions. In light of Darl’s apparent ability to laugh and experience emotions for the first time in the text, it is ambiguous whether the ending should be read as optimistic or not. The stereotype that would have been prevalent in the 1920s and ‘30s when Faulkner was writing the novel-- that shell-shock was caused by a lack of female care after returning from the war (Stagner 263)-- would have been applicable in Darl’s case. Addie was not a warm maternal figure, and Darl’s consistent focus on Jewel throughout the narrative shows how bothered he was by his half-brother’s preferential treatment by their mother. In the absence of maternal love and support from Addie, Darl had suppressed his emotions so deeply that he was not even able to access them until the conclusion of the novel. It is possible that the death of Addie was both a trigger that led to Darl reexperiencing his trauma, as well as a relief from the abuse that she caused and an escape from the burden of trying to become worthy of her love, which led to Darl’s healing. Similarly, the rest of Darl’s family do not appear to have any significant care for him either, as they send him away to the asylum for their own convenience and benefit. Although it is well-known that asylums were not generally restorative places in the early 1900s (Sutton) and that they often perpetrated their own crimes of abuse against residents (Sutton), Faulkner could be suggesting that the asylum is still a better alternative for Darl than the dysfunction of living with

an abusive and uncaring family. Since the novel ends before Darl reaches the asylum, any takeaways about how he might fare in the new setting, had Faulkner extended the story, could only be speculative. However, Darl’s apparent acceptance of his emotions while on the train ride does provide a bit of optimism for an ending that appears so bleak on the surface. This analysis into Darl’s traumatic past in the war provides a deeper understanding of the connection between the way in which Faulkner wrote Darl’s voice in stream-of-consciousness and the nature of Darl’s mental health. The focus on factual, precise language, combined with elaborate prose illuminates some of the coping mechanisms that individuals with trauma often experience in real life, such as an avoidance of certain thought patterns, a desire to have control over one’s environment and the people in it, and a belief that fantasy-thought can be unsafe. This helps us to answer one of the central questions of the text: is Darl insane? I argue that Faulkner would want the reader to believe that the answer to that question is no. Faulkner portrays Darl as a veteran who experienced significant trauma during his time in World War I, during a decade when there were only pseudoscientific treatments available for the devastating condition of shell-shock. Darl did not have a supportive family-- and one could argue that he actually had an abusive one-- to help him through his experience, which caused him to become stuck in the cycle of latency and reexperiencing that is characteristic of PTSD (and its predecessor of shell-shock). The death of Addie Bundren, his mother who would never love him as much as she loved Jewel, was a trigger that catalyzed Darl’s descent into what appears to be madness on the surface of As I Lay Dying; but a closer inspection of the text reveals that Darl was likely to be an ordinary man who had the untreated “double wound” of trauma from his time in the Great War.

Works Cited

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

Delville, Michel. “Alienating Language and Darl's Narrative Consciousness in Faulkner's ‘As I Lay Dying.’” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 27, no. 1, 1994, pp. 61–72.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage International, 2005.

“Glare, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, Dec. 2019, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/78732?rskey=Pjc9w5&resul t=1&isAdvanced=false#eid.

Hale, Dorothy J. “‘As I Lay Dying's’ Heterogeneous Discourse.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 23, no. 1, 1989, pp. 5–23.

Hannon, Charles. “The Function of Function Words in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 29, no. 1, 2015, pp. 3–21., doi:10.1353/fau.2015.0006.

Hwang, Eunju. “Language and Schizophrenia in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.” CEA Critic: An Official Journal of the College English Association, vol. 70, no. 3, 1 Jan. 2008, pp. 1–19.

Jones, Edgar, and Simon Wessely. “Battle for the Mind: World War 1 and the Birth of Military Psychiatry.” Legacy of the 1914-18 War, King's College London, 8 Nov. 2014, https://www.kcl.ac.uk/kcmhr/publications/assetfiles/2014/Jone s2014e.pdf.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” Reading French Psychoanalysis, 2014, pp. 97–104., doi:10.4324/9781315787374-6

Olsen, Kathryn. “Raveling Out Like a Looping String: As I Lay Dying and Regenerative Language.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 33, no. 4, 2010, pp. 95–111, doi:10.2979/jml.2010.33.4.95

Palliser, Charles. “Predestination and Freedom in As I Lay Dying.” American Literature, vol. 58, no. 4, Dec. 1986, pp. 557–573., doi:10.2307/2926441

Pettey, Homer B. “Perception and the Destruction of Being in As I Lay Dying.” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 19, no. 1, 2003, pp. 27–46. Stagner, Annessa C. “Healing the Soldier, Restoring the Nation: Representations of Shell Shock in the USA During and After the First World War.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 49, no. 2, 2014, pp. 255–274., doi:10.1177/0022009413515532

Sutton, John R. “The Political Economy of Madness: The Expansion of the Asylum in Progressive America.” American Sociological Review, vol. 56, no. 5, 1991, pp. 665–678., doi:10.2307/2096087

Tevlin, Zachary. “‘Ravel Out Into Time’: Phenomenology and Temporality in As I Lay Dying.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures, vol. 68, no. 1-2, 1 Jan. 2015, pp. 83–100.

Van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Alexander C. McFarlane. “The Black Hole of Trauma.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd ed., Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 487–502.