Time is continuous in this book, which means nothing that happens in the course of events will be incidental. Addie dies and the family loads her coffin in their wagon and sets off for Jefferson. At this point the reader may realize that it is a habit of some family members to see things as something other than what they are. It is Darl, the major narrator of the novel, who most often is given to this : “Below the sky,” he says ”sheet-lightning slumbers lightly ; against it the trees, motionless, are ruffled out to the last twig, swollen, increased as though quick with young.” Or his mother, Addie, just having died, he sees “her peaceful rigid face fading into the dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the ultimate earth, until at last the face seems to float detached upon it, lightly as the reflection of a dead leaf.” It is poets who make transformative observations that intensify life. Darl’s gift, his language of thought being far beyond the capability of his father or his siblings, suggests why they think he is touched. And Faulkner may be saying that Darl requires that diagnosis, or else how can he, Faulkner, get away with verbiage in such contrast with the diction of the common tongue . For the other speakers, family members and neighbors, with the exception perhaps of the little boy Vardaman, have only country speech – serviceable and even primitively eloquent, but hardly with the gift of metaphor:”We never aimed to bother nobody,” Anse says to a town marshal. Dewy Dell says “I’d liefer go back.” The oldest son, Cash, looking at the swollen river they need to cross says: “If I’d just suspicioned it, I could a come down last week and taken a sight on it.” The remarkable thing is that the book’s two modes of discourse – its literary thinking and common speech — are complementary. The inner and outer life run together on this perilous family journey — it’s as if the words themselves are shadow- lettered and given dimension.