Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 143

Humor in William Faulkner 139 the two views gives rise to a complicated and ambivalent feeling of hilarity and despair. . . . The interplay of seriousness which reaches toward tragedy and of humor which is practically farce is part of the complex success o f As I Lay Dying. In a sense, it reinforces the theme of the separation of words and acts. . . . At the same time it precludes any easy generalizations about the funeral journey itself. Any event or series of events elicits various and, at times, contradictory responses.^ Though there are other humorous effects in the novel, Vickery explains most of the humor of As I Lay Dying when she says that it derives primarily from the combination of the antagonistic views of the Bundrens and their observers. The two views, that the Bundrens' actions are rational and that they are not rational are not easily resolvable and serve to prevent any easy generalizations about the novel. They serve to prevent resolution. One of the contradictions between what the Bundrens believe and what their neighbors believe is seen in Vardaman's statement "But my mother is a fish. Vernon seen it. He was t h e r e " A s we know, Vernon has not seen it. The contradiction is not important in one sense, for the reader already knows that Addie Bundren is not a fish; but the fact that Vardaman must use Vernon as evidence casts doubt on his own conviction of his mother's metamorphosis. As far as the funeral procession is concerned, one of the strongest statements of disapproval is made by Samson. When Samson tries to persuade the Bundrens to sleep inside, and they refuse in order to be with the corpse, he tells us of his thoughts and actions. "'She's been dead long enough to get over that foolishness,' I says. Because I got just as much respect for the dead as ere a man, but you got to respect the dead themselves, and a woman that's been dead in a box for four days, the best way to respect her is to get her into the ground as quick as you can" (AILD, 419). Here, Faulkner has combined two antagonistic views of what constitutes respect, and there can be no certainty of whose view is the correct one. Further humor in the novel comes from the juxtaposition of the Bundrens' overt and secret reasons for taking the body to Jefferson. The reader can never be sure of the real reason why any one of most of