- From his first narrative, Darl is obsessed with vision: what he can see, as well as what others might see from other perspectives. What do you notice about Darl’s distinctive mode of vision throughout the novel?
From the start of the novel, Darl’s descriptive language immediately grabs the reader’s attention. It immediately immerses the reader into the world that Darl and Jewel are in. “The cotton-house is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long fallen. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite walls giving on to the approaches of the path.” He describes Jewel, the path in which they are walking on and their surroundings with such detail that the reader can clearly see with their imagination what Jewel looks like, the way he walks, the way the cotton-house looks, how far apart Jewel and Darl are from each other while walking, and even the path they are walking on.
This is quite different in comparison to the way that Cora speaks/thinks in her sections off the novel. Cora’s section is almost quite literally a stream of thoughts and conversation. Compared to Darl’s descriptive language, Cora’s is simpler but also more relatable and easier to digest. Darl’s language is more sophisticated and complex. Much of his thoughts are observations of his surroundings or other people. There isn’t as much dialogue as there is in Cora’s sections, for example, or in Jewel’s shorter section in the beginning of the novel where he expresses his thoughts—the most we know of him so far.
What I notice about Darl’s mode of vision throughout the novel is that he is almost acting like the narrator of the story He describes everything in such great detail that the reader gets the information that they need to figure out what is going on, where they are, what things must look and feel like, and what the characters around Darl, and Darl himself, are doing. I think this is a unique and important part of the novel from the reader’s perspective because it offers another lens, one with broader vision and is unfiltered as if it was being told in the third person.
