Major Role from Minor: Charactrization of Dr. Peabody in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

Abstract

In As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner’s main concern turns from an isolated hero to people. Dr. Peabody as a minor character begins to receive our attention when his obese body dragged up the steep hill to the Bundren house via a rope. Dr. Peabody first attends to Addie and later to Cash. In the process of his relation to the Bundrens, Peabody finally becomes one of the memorable minor characters. Dr. Peabody suggests the dialectic based on the relationship between word and deed, death and life, that is, a formal method of argument, in which new positions are reached by testing opposing views against one another. Peabody points to an answer to Addie s sense of death in his own ideas of life. In his final homey image, Dr. Peabody suggests us a solution: in the union of abstraction and concretion, fact and metaphor is interchangeable.