An Anti-Mentor for an Inverted Hero’s Journey

A Lesson Before Dying takes an unconventional approach to the paradigm of the hero’s journey. Grant’s “mission” does not entail a physical or geographical journey. He merely has to drive the thirteen miles from “the Quarters” to the town of Bayonne, repeatedly, where Jefferson sits in a jail cell awaiting his execution. Unlike the Bundrens, he has a nice, new 1946 Ford to get him there and back, and the travel itself is not rigorous. There are familiar elements from the hero’s journey paradigm, however—he must pass through a series of obstacles in order to take this trip, from “humiliating” himself by imploring Henri Pichot to talk the sheriff into authorizing these visits to having his pockets and Miss Emma’s picnic basket thoroughly searched each time he takes that long walk down the corridor, “as if I’m some kind of common criminal” (63)—and when we first encounter Jefferson in his cell he seems very far away indeed. Grant’s task—to make Jefferson “a man” before he meets his death—seems astronomically difficult, under the circumstances, and Grant’s been trying to “refuse the call” from the moment he’s first enlisted.

Rather than having to venture elsewhere in order to prove himself a hero, Grant must go inward, to the “belly of the beast” (or “innermost cave,” to borrow Campbell’s phrase) in the segregated South. Although Bayonne is all-too-familiar to Grant, as he grew up in the Quarters, there’s a potent sense of him entering hostile, enemy territory as he goes into Bayonne: the courthouse proudly sports the “national, state, and Confederate flags,” and Grant must walk past a “statue of a Confederate soldier” to enter the seat of state power over black lives (69). We see a jail populated by a hostile white sheriff and deputy, and black inmates who look like children. It’s a journey he really would rather not make, and we see Grant exhibit a range of quasi-adolescent efforts to avoid it, sulking, dragging his feet, and fantasizing about running away and leaving it all behind.

We see an ironic inversion of the hero’s journey paradigm here, where “staying home” and confronting the legacies of slavery and institutional racism by trying to “reach” this doomed young man requires more heroic courage than leaving home for the unknown. Grant had viewed college as his ticket out of the Quarters—a chance to “not be one of the others” (63), as his aunt puts it—and he seems disappointed in himself for coming back home afterward. The humiliation he endures in order to gain the “privilege” of visiting Jefferson “strips” him of “everything [Tante Lou] sent [him] to school for” (79). We know his parents have left Louisiana for California, following the route of many African Americans in the 1940s, who fled the South for West Coast war-industry jobs. Grant visited them once, but as Vivian says, “‘You couldn’t stay. You had to come back’” (30). It’s not only the Jefferson dilemma that generates this restlessness in Grant—he’s felt this way for a long time. Staying home and working as a teacher in this impoverished, sharecropper community is itself cast as an exercise in futility, with Grant perpetuating the cycle of racism and poverty.

In the annals of the “heroic teacher” paradigm, Grant would seem to be a poor candidate for the role: this isn’t Stand and Deliver or Dead Poets Society. Grant is a teacher with deep-seated doubts about whether teaching even matters, a member of his community who sees himself as an outsider, with his education a “burden” that makes him aware of the futility and the “cycle,” but unable to do anything to change it. He’d be better off without his education, perhaps—he could unload wood like these other guys, joke around, not worry so much. Nothing about Grant’s teaching seems “inspirational”—he thwacks students with a yardstick for writing sentences crooked or counting on their fingers, and he’s compelled to drill them like military enlistees in important skills like pledging allegiance to the flag that flies outside the jail where Jefferson will be executed, “hating himself” for doing it.

In a flashback in chapter 8, we learn that Grant didn’t come up with this whole “run away and be free of all this” motif on his own. He’s had a “mentor,” of sorts—and again, we see a familiar paradigm inverted. Grant’s own former teacher, Matthew Antoine, serves the structural role of the mentor in this journey—he’s the one who gives this young teacher his “knowledge,” his ostensible power to change lives through the magic of education, the eager student who would follow in the teacher’s footsteps. We’ve seen this montage in movies before: the fiery, bright student whose love for knowledge and justice is ignited by his own teacher, and we see the student rise to be a master himself, to heroically throw in with the good fight in the classroom. But Gaines pitches a curveball in the form of Grant’s mentor, and Antoine is maybe the least inspirational teacher-figure in American literature (with Addie Bundren running a close second, perhaps). He not only doesn’t inspire Grant, he vehemently warns Grant away from pursuing knowledge and education. Grant’s persistence doesn’t impress the old grouch, as in the familiar paradigm; it only irritates him further. “There was no love there for each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything at all. He hated me, and I knew it” (64). But Grant has learned some lessons from Antoine, and we see his anti-mentor’s legacy popping up throughout the novel, every time Grant speaks of the futility of his enterprise and his desire to run away and leave it all behind. If the “journey” in this novel requires staying home and facing Jefferson and his fate head-on, in the belly of the beast, with Vivian serving as an ally to encourage Grant at every turn, Antoine represents the most prominent voice urging him to give up, to flee, to not even bother. He would seem to agree with Jefferson’s initial assessment: “It don’t matter.”

Despite calling himself a coward for not having run away himself—“‘I was afraid to run away. What am I? Look at me. Where else could I have felt superior to so many but here?’” (65)—Antoine generally depicts flight as a bid for freedom, a sensible ducking of any responsibility to try and contribute to the community in favor of going elsewhere, anywhere else. Grant’s teacher is not flattered by his student’s newfound desire to learn (“When he saw that I wanted to learn, he hated me even more than he did the others”) and depicts knowledge as a “burden” (63). He has no faith in the power of education to affect change: “When you see that those five and a half months you spend in that church each year are just a waste of time . . . [y]ou’ll see that it’ll take more than five and a half months to wipe away—peel—scrape away the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those brains in the past three hundred years. You’ll see” (64). We are confronted with the curious prospect of a mentor who begs his mentee to not follow his footsteps.

Early in the novel, before the “journey” of encounters with Jefferson in his cell begins, Gaines includes a powerful, authoritative voice that seems to undermine the value of the journey itself. If all education in this underfunded, one-room church is futile and doomed to fail from the start, how much more doomed is Grant’s attempt to “make Jefferson a man?” Grant is thoroughly pessimistic about his prospects from the beginning, telling his aunt and Miss Emma, “Jefferson is dead. It is only a matter of weeks, maybe a couple of months—but he’s already dead. The past twenty-one years, we’ve done all we could for Jefferson. He’s dead now. And I can’t raise the dead” (14). Antoine couldn’t have said it better himself. Perhaps he’d be proud of his mentee after all.

“Yourself and Your Doings outen His Eyes”

There’s something about Darl that just weirds people out. And I’m not just talking about readers. I’m talking about the other people in his life. Darl has a reputation as a strange young man whose spacey, dreamy demeanor unnerves others. The outside perspectives on the Bundren clan seem to agree in portraying Darl as “the queer one,” “the one folks talk about,” with his “eyes full of the land” all the time. Tull breaks it down this way: “I have said and I say again, that’s ever living thing the matter with Darl: he just thinks by himself too much” (71). Anse is painfully aware of his son’s reputation, as he winces at Darl laughing hysterically at Jewel following the wagon on his horse: “How many times I told him it’s doing such things as that that makes folks talk about him” (105).

Cora (not the most reliable judge) is the only one who seems inclined to defend Darl, distancing herself from the prevailing view of his “queerness” and framing him instead as a kind of religious visionary. She describes Darl approaching his mother’s deathbed before leaving on his three-dollar errand with Jewel as “the sweetest thing I ever saw,” something that restores her “faith in human nature”: “It was Darl, the one that folks say is queer, lazy, pottering about the place no better than Anse” (24). She agrees that Darl is not like the rest of the family (except maybe Anse, not too flattering a comparison), but she frames this as a good thing: “I always said Darl was different from those others. I always said he was the only one of them that had his mother’s nature, had any natural affection” (21). Of course, once we’ve read Addie’s chapter, we might question this appraisal of Addie as embodying “natural affection.” But Cora’s narrative introduces the idea that Darl’s strangeness can be interpreted variously, that his extreme sensitivity might actually be a kind of special intelligence. Yes, he may act “queer,” but look who he’s surrounded by! Cora goes so far as to call Darl “touched by God Himself and considered queer by us mortals” (168). If he weirds us out, maybe the shortcoming, the failure of understanding, is our own, mere mortals that we be.

It’s probably safe to say that, for most readers, all of the Bundrens seem pretty eccentric in one way or another. But it’s notable that Darl is the only one who seems to strike the people around him as strange. Anse’s eccentricity can be understood—it might be criticized, it might exasperate people, but ultimately it makes sense to them as “Anse just being Anse,” “doing the best he can”—whereas Darl’s just doesn’t make sense. What’s he always thinking about? Why do his eyes always look so far away, “full of the land”? It’s worth noting that, as readers of his chapters—he is the most frequent narrator, and his chapters tend to be longer and more developed—our picture of Darl is quite different from how he appears to those around him. He doesn’t seem spacey to us; he seems hyperperceptive, with a ridiculous vocabulary, and we almost don’t notice that he rarely seems to be doing much of anything in most of these scenes. He’s the quiet observer, taking it all in, and for some reason, this makes everyone a little uneasy in his presence.

Tull describes “the Darl effect” memorably: “He dont say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk. I always say it aint never been what he done so much or said or anything so much as how he looks at you. It’s like he had got inside you someway. Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes” (125). It’s as if people can feel Darl looking at them—through them. Almost as if they are being narrated by him. And readers notice some of Darl’s uncanny perceptiveness as well, when his narrative point of view departs from his body and views himself from a distance, seeing Jewel’s head bobbing along behind him from somewhere distant in front of him in the opening chapter, or when he narrates in great detail scenes he did not witness firsthand. Some critics have straight-up described Darl as “clairvoyant,” and the novel does seem to grant him a form of extrasensory perception. Dewey Dell describes the disturbing awareness that Darl somehow knows her secret—“I saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without the words” (27)—in terms that recall Tull’s discomfort with “how he looks at you.” And Darl himself describes how he became aware of his mother’s infidelity, without actually “knowing” firsthand, as he observes her sitting vigil next to Jewel’s bed: “And then I knew that I knew. I knew that as plain on that day as I knew about Dewey Dell on that day” (136). He seems a little freaked out by his own ability to just know things he maybe wishes he didn’t.

But for the reader, while some of this might make Darl seem “queer” or strange, paradoxically he is the most reliable anchor we’ve got in this fictional world. The very “clairvoyance” that gives others the creeps makes him able to narrate with a striking degree of perceptiveness. The “knowledge”—he’s the only one alive (aside from Whitfield, who doesn’t appear to be talking) who knows about Addie’s infidelity and Jewel’s real father—is largely what makes him a good narrator. The other characters, for the most part, don’t seem like they’re telling a story so much as spilling their unconnected stream of consciousness onto the page. Vardaman is the most extreme of these highly subjective narrators—his private language is almost impenetrable—but Dewey Dell too is (understandably) immersed in her own world and her own private troubles. Cash’s narration keeps getting cut off mid-sentence, as he goes on about “making it on the bevel” and setting the coffin “on the balance,” creating the impression that he is too eager to get back to work to waste time narrating. Anse is immersed in lamenting his own suffering and bad luck. But Darl almost never talks about himself. It’s ironic that the one everyone else sees as so self-absorbed and dreamy is the least subjective of the narrators. He’s so non-subjective, he’s even able to narrate in detail scenes at which he isn’t even present.

The quintessential moments in As I Lay Dying are mostly narrated by Darl, and two of these he’s not present for. In a chapter in the middle of the novel (128-36), Darl gives us the full, linear story of Jewel at age fifteen sneaking off to work at night and earn money to buy the horse. Darl himself is mostly absent from the story, included in the “we” who react to Jewel riding up on his horse, but mostly focusing on his mother, father, brother, and sister. He seems like a reliable narrator precisely because he doesn’t reveal a strong opinion about the horse (as opposed to how Anse might narrate this episode, for example). He doesn’t put himself into the story, but merely records the words and actions of others. We can imagine him throughout these events, with “the land in his eyes,” acting “queer”—but the detailed narrative he delivers shows that he’s paying attention, and that he’s both intelligent and perceptive. (He’d make a good novelist, actually.)

Two scenes he narrates that are central to the novel and that he isn’t even present for likewise reflect Darl’s remarkable literary abilities. We could get hung up on the question of how he even “knows” all this stuff is happening back home when he’s stuck in a stranger’s barn hiding from the rain with Jewel. But we don’t, I think, because his narrative is so plausible in its rendering of character. The stuff he tells us feels accurate. I’ll focus on two parallel moments, both involving Anse, to illustrate.

Just after Addie has died, Darl portrays Anse as having been left alone with her in the room. He “stands over the bed, dangle-armed, humped, motionless. He raises his hand to his head, scouring his hair, listening to the saw” (51-52). He awkwardly rubs his hand on his thigh (we recognize the classic Anse gesture) and “lays it on her face and then on the hump of quilt where her hands are. He touches the quilt as he saw Dewey Dell do, trying to smooth it up to the chin, but disarranging it instead. He tries to smooth it again, clumsily, his hand awkward as a claw smoothing at the wrinkles which he made and which continue to emerge beneath his hand with perverse ubiquity, so that at last he desists, his hand falling to his side” (52). Questions of “reliability” do not arise here—there’s little point in wondering if Anse “really did” all this. It feels so right, it so compactly captures his awkwardness, his confusion, his inarticulable grief and his bewilderment as to how to express it. He’s left to clumsily imitate Dewey Dell’s simple gesture of raising the quilt to her mother’s chin, but all he does is screw it up, and then his efforts to fix it screw it up even worse. He finally gives up, mute and perplexed. And then he says, out loud, “God’s will be done. . . . Now I can get them teeth” (52). We have Anse in a nutshell here—that infuriating combination of poignant grief, dedication to his wife’s memory and his vow to return her to her people’s land, and his self-serving desire to finally get them teeth.

There’s a similar moment in Darl’s next chapter, where he narrates, in similar detail, the scene where everyone sits around in the rain while Cash finishes the coffin. Cash tells his father to “go on in. . . . Me and Vernon can finish it” (78). (He hasn’t been all that much help anyway.) “Pa looks at them. The sleeves of Jewel’s coat are too short for him. Upon his face the rain streams, slow as cold glycerin. ‘I dont begrudge her the wetting,’ he says. He moves again and falls to shifting the planks, picking them up, laying them down again carefully, as though they are glass. He goes to the lantern and pulls at the propped raincoat until he knocks it down and Cash comes and fixes it back” (78). Not only is he not helping, going through this meaningless gesture of picking up and setting down the planks; he’s making a mess (like with Addie’s quilt), and Cash has to stop working and come over to clean up after him. It would be better if Anse just didn’t touch anything, or do anything. “You go in the house,” Cash tells him (78). But there’s a poignance to Darl’s portrait of his father here, an awareness of an emotional depth that may not be evident to everyone else, and often isn’t evident to readers. He literally doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s beside himself with grief. And he maybe doesn’t relish the idea of going in the house and sitting with his wife’s body. He wants to be out here, among the men. But he’s just getting wet and getting in the way, knocking stuff over, in a coat that doesn’t fit.

Perhaps this does reflect Darl’s subjective view of his father. Perhaps he’s making this all up, or imagining it. But for readers of the novel, these scenes are as vivid and detailed as anything else in the book, and I for one am not at all troubled by the fact that Darl seems to be imagining them. Like good fiction, they feel right.