LITERATURE: As I Lay Dying – Time

Though I’m not sure I agree with the language and thought patterns that Faulkner assigns his characters, I do again see his dedication to understanding the passage of time in other than our own decided measured out format.  Here Darl, one of Addie’s sons, is narrating the story as they try to cross a swollen stream with Addie’s coffin in the back of the wagon:

The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice.  Yet they appear dwarfed.  It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between.  (p. 146)

You need to read this several times to visualize it.  I keep in mind something Anse, the father, had made a point of early on in the novel; that is, that roads brought a horizontalness and motion to the world that man and trees, as uprights, were yet in conflict.  Darl’s view above can give us a point of time from here to there–most easily seen as ahead.  But here he sees the river as time running sideways, separating him and his brothers Cash and Jewel, and of course the body of their mother, from the others across the stream.  They appear smaller than they should at his estimated distance. 

"runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between" – This is more difficult to comprehend.  Focusing upon the double threads (being looped) and the idea of a loop being endless, I almost see time as running on between them as they are standing still; an idea of infinity and how the human mind and body are unaffected by it, as well as it by them.  Addie has been dead five days, and yet she is lying among them.  Does it affect her the same way as those living?  I see the separation of the family by some Faulknerian measure of time and space, and wonder how it affects the story.