As Booth states, “the author can achieve effects which would
be difficult or impossible if he allowed himself or a reliable spokesman to
speak directly and authoritatively to us.” (Booth, 273) Faulkner has 15 different dramatized narrators
in which lies “a confused variety of more-or-less reliable narrators, many of
them puzzling mixtures of sound and unsound.” (Booth, 274)
Peabody only speaks
at the beginning and ending of the book. Faulkner has Peabody place a great
deal of judgment on Anse. Peabody’s negative perception of the Bundrens comes
from him coming from a different social class and not being able to understand
the ways in which a less fortunate family gets by. Peabody attempts to discredit
Anse by judging the way he treats Cash’s leg injury. ‘Concrete, I said. ‘God
Almighty, why didn’t Anse carry you to the nearest sawmill and stick your leg
in the saw? That would have cured it. Then you all could have stuck his head
into the saw and cured a whole family…’ (Faulkner, 240) Peabody is an example
of an unreliable narrator. Anse, regardless of how barbaric his attempts are to
help his son Cash, does it with the best intentions.
The ending of the novel with Anse introducing his children
to his new wife is told by Cash one of the most reliable narrators in the
novel. Nowhere in the novel does it explicitly say that Anse from the viewpoint
of his children is a selfish person. This is an example of the “authorial
silence” that allows readers to work out their own interpretation of the novel.
As the novel unravels it is clear that Anse along with the rest of the Bundren
family are in fact after their own selfish interests.
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