Darl’s Sanity. Was He Really Crazy? In William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying, the reader is met with Darl Bundren, one of five children Addie Bundren has birthed. From the start, Darl presents himself as a philosophical character with curious ideas and a strange mind. Often throughout the novel, he asks very strange and disturbing questions. By the end, Darl could be declared insane as he talks to himself on the train and that would be the end of the discussion. But is Darl really mentally insane? Or is there a deeper reason to his actions and words that led to the ultimatum of his departure on the train to Jackson? Darl shows signs of psychological disorders which at that time was a strange and unspoken concept with little access to help. …show more content…
Sociopaths act of passion or random bursts of rage, and Darl seems to want to end his mother’s “suffering” or he wants to kill Jewel’s horse because to Darl, that horse is a symbol of his mother, which he seems to not want to remember. His desensitization is a huge clue to this theory. In Darl’s section, he says “The sound of it had become quite peaceful now, like the sound of the river did…. Jewel runs crouching to the far end of the coffin and stoops to it. For an instant he looks up and out at us through the rain of burning hay… and I can see his mouth shape as he calls my name.” (page 221). In this line, Darl is clearly desensitized to his mother's death. It’s obvious. If Darl were concerned with the well being of his mother’s body and cared about the condition it arrived in, he would be as frantic as Jewel was in saving the body. In fact, he wouldn’t even burn down the barn in the first place. However, the plausibility ends there. The sociopathic personality is developed, not inherited and can come from traumatic experiences. Darl could simply be suffering from a different disorder and only resembles the qualities of a sociopath. His desensitization can be linked to what is known now as dissociative disorder. Dissociative disorder is a psychological issue that causes the suffering person to lack strong emotions or feelings toward others or any situations. Darl consistently shows all the signs of this disorder. He seems to start viewing his mother as a lifeless corpse and has no more significant meaning in his