Tull takes his mule out to follow the wagon, and catches up with it down by the levee. The Bundrens stand at the river’s edge, staring at the washed-out bridge and contemplating a crossing. Jewel lashes out at Tull for following them down to the river. Cash hushes Jewel, and announces a plan for a crossing. Jewel asks Tull to help them cross with his mule, but Tull refuses.
Darl observes Jewel glaring at Tull. Darl recalls a time during Jewel’s teenage years when he began falling asleep regularly during the day. He remembers how Addie used to cover up his mistakes for him. Initially Cash and Darl suspected that Jewel was spending his nights with a married woman, but one night Cash trailed Jewel on his midnight run and found evidence to the contrary. All is revealed a few months later when Jewel materializes on a new horse that he has purchased from Quick after clearing forty acres of his land, working at night by lantern. Anse is upset by this gesture of independence, and later that night Darl finds Addie crying beside Jewel, who is asleep in bed.
Tull accompanies Anse and Dewey Dell and Vardaman on a treacherous crossing along the washed-out bridge. Eventually they make the other side, and Cash and Darl and Jewel turn the wagon around and drive it down to the ford.
Commentary
In the world Faulkner creates, where so little is said, so much is communicated through glances and by eyes. When Tull arrives to help the Bundrens at the river’s edge, he finds himself being stared at in three very different ways by three very different Bundren siblings. Darl’s gaze is knowing, Dewy Dell’s is lustful and Jewel’s is hostile. Leaving aside the simple hostility of Jewel’s vision, let’s examine more fully the nature of the gazes of Darl and Dewey Dell.
Tull finds Dewey Dell looking at him like he was wanting to touch her. This may involve an real desire on the part of Dewey Dell to actually be touched, given the content of the monologues that she has delivered. Earlier, when Samson offered to put the Bundrens up for the night, he felt Dewey Dell’s eyes fixed on him as though pistols, blazing at him. Dewey Dell, checked by propriety against doing, or even saying, to these men, looks right through the standards of decorum and into the deep heart of desire. The intensity of her gaze is not lost on any of those whom she bestows it upon, and she is by no means reserved in applying it.
That Dewey Dell should be so wild-eyed is unsurprising in light of her outrageous thoughts. In addition to the fervor of her feeling for Lafe and Peabody, and the strength of her stares at Samson and Tull, she is driven to distraction by her family relationships as well. In a stream-of-consciousness sequence, she imagines being asleep in a bed next to Vardaman when suddenly she finds “all of them back under me again and going on like a piece of cool silk dragging across my naked legs.” Because Vardaman is pre-sexual, he doesn’t participate, but apart from that, Dewey Dell finds herself unwillingly overwhelmed by abstract incestuous desire.
Because of her sense of seductiveness, even where her family is concerned, Dewey Dell believes that she has a special pull over the Bundren males. In the wagon on the way to New Hope, she meditates on her power over Anse, sure that he will do a she says, that she can persuade him to do anything. However, she isn’t as positive of Darl’s automatic compliance. This frustrates Dewey Dell to the point of hostility, even to the point where she imagines killing him.
Darl stymied Dewey Dell because his gaze exceeds hers in degree, and is of a kind that she is powerless to comprehend. Whereas Dewey Dell’s gaze is sexually charged and therefore extremely focused, Darl’s is dispassionate and seemingly all-encompassing. Dewey Dell herself remarks that “the land runs out of Darl’s eyes,” suggesting that he has an overarching power to observe, process and explain the environment around him. This superhuman detachment and understanding is what makes Darl seem such a strange creature to other people, and generates much talk over his difference.
Again, the eyes have it. As Tull arrives at the river’s edge to help the Bundrens with the crossing, he is paralyzed by Darl, who, as Tull says, “looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk.” As Tull explains, it was never so much as what Darl said or did as the way in which he look at others. The intensity of that gaze makes it seem, “Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes.”
Darl’s ability to transmit a sense of omniscience is largely due to the richness of his inner life, and especially, of his moral life. In remembering the incident where Jewel earned money by moonlight to buy a horse, Darl reveals the understanding of his gaze in several instances. He perceives Jewel wasting away, and knows that something is wrong; he perceives Addie by Jewel’s bedside, and knows that she is plagued by guilt for the deceit she has employed to cover his tracks; he perceives Cash the morning after Cash trailed Jewel on his mission, and knows that Cash has found out Jewel’s secret. Darl’s eyes are as strong as they are because of the careful scrutiny that they place on the eyes of others, in the above passages and throughout the remainder of the novel.