Post by msheil9 on Oct 12, 2011 19:13:12 GMT -5
I looked up the context of the title, since we knew it was from Homer’s Odyssey, and I found the line that it’s taken from: "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades."
The speaker is Agamemnon who’s killed by his wife and his wife’s lover. Agamemnon mentions eyes twice in that single quote: the first time in insulting his wife and the second time referring to the indignity she inflicts on him by refusing to close his eyes as he dies, similar to the indignities the Bundren’s inflict upon Addie’s body—putting her in her coffin upside-down, drilling holes in her face, etc. We obviously see a lot of eyes in As I Lay Dying.
Jewel’s eyes are wooden: “his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face” (4), according to Darl.
Addie’s eyes are “like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks” (8), according to Cora. And interestingly, later Tull describes Jewel’s eyes too as “pieces of burnt-out cinders on his face” (32).
And Darl’s eyes are all-seeing—he can “see” through Dewey Dell and her affair with Lafe, and he can “see” Addie’s death, even though he isn’t there.
These are the only ones I can remember from what we’ve read so far.
Eyes are definitely a prominent theme in the book, allowing readers to infer things about certain characters per others’ descriptions of their eyes, as Agamemnon described his wife as having “dog’s eyes” in the title’s original context. We also talked about the “I” in As I Lay Dying being Addie, and I think it is, but so much of the novel happens after she is dead, so I wonder if the “I” could be someone else as well. Did anyone else extract anything from the title?
The speaker is Agamemnon who’s killed by his wife and his wife’s lover. Agamemnon mentions eyes twice in that single quote: the first time in insulting his wife and the second time referring to the indignity she inflicts on him by refusing to close his eyes as he dies, similar to the indignities the Bundren’s inflict upon Addie’s body—putting her in her coffin upside-down, drilling holes in her face, etc. We obviously see a lot of eyes in As I Lay Dying.
Jewel’s eyes are wooden: “his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face” (4), according to Darl.
Addie’s eyes are “like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks” (8), according to Cora. And interestingly, later Tull describes Jewel’s eyes too as “pieces of burnt-out cinders on his face” (32).
And Darl’s eyes are all-seeing—he can “see” through Dewey Dell and her affair with Lafe, and he can “see” Addie’s death, even though he isn’t there.
These are the only ones I can remember from what we’ve read so far.
Eyes are definitely a prominent theme in the book, allowing readers to infer things about certain characters per others’ descriptions of their eyes, as Agamemnon described his wife as having “dog’s eyes” in the title’s original context. We also talked about the “I” in As I Lay Dying being Addie, and I think it is, but so much of the novel happens after she is dead, so I wonder if the “I” could be someone else as well. Did anyone else extract anything from the title?