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Dramatic Irony
3. Darl
Explanation and Analysis—Darl's Water:
In Chapter 3, Darl explores water as a symbol for possibility in a flashback memory:
When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket [...]
I used to lie on the pallet in the hall, waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket. It would be black [...] before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank.
Darl remembers the magical thinking of his youth through the vehicle of water. He remembers the innocence and possibility of childhood, believing that water could be made to taste different at night as it mixes with the stars. This hope, that he possessed the agency to seize and drink the stars, stands in stark contrast to his distress at his more passive position as an older boy. Darl frequently has visions or mysterious secret knowledge, but few take him seriously, and those that do are unsettled by him. In the end, the family commits him to a mental hospital.
39. Cora
Explanation and Analysis—Favoring Jewel:
In a flashback in Chapter 39, Cora recounts a prior conversation she had with Addie about her affection for Jewel:
Then I realised that she did not mean God. I realised that out of the vanity of her heart she had spoken sacrilege. And I went down on my knees right there. I begged her to kneel and open her heart and cast from it the devil of vanity and cast herself upon the mercy of the Lord. But she wouldn’t. wouldn’t. She just sat there, lost in her vanity and her pride, that had closed her heart to God and set that selfish mortal boy in His place.
This flashback is one of the only times in the novel readers see Addie in good health and thus one of the only ways they can realize her personality rather than the way she is remembered and understood by other characters. Given the often selfish motivations of her husband and children in preparing her body and taking it to Jefferson, it can feel easy at times to feel nothing but sorry for Addie. She seems to have been a woman with little support and no appreciation for her labor even after her death. The family seems cold and self-serving.
In this passage though, the reader understands through Cora that Addie, too, was engaged in the troubled family dynamic. She self-admittedly favored Jewel above the other children and placed him above God—something even Addie acknowledged as sin. Here, Addie appears as a dynamic, flawed character rather than an innocent victim. Addie offers a parallel flashback in Chapter 40, where she expresses her anger at becoming a mother, becoming a tragic and troubled figure.
Related Themes:
