The Bundren family in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying would drive any sane individual mad; this is ultimately what defeats the thoughtful idealist Darl. The only one to inherit Addie's sense of questioning the world, he is also the only one to consistently look beyond himself, his problems, and the realities of life on a farm in an effort to discover deeper truths. In the end, however, his tenuous grasp on the real world in which he lives is shattered by the unreal voyage his family undertook to bury his mother in Jefferson, and it was his idealism -- his sense of how the world should work, regardless of how it really does -- that caused him to retreat into himself and realize that the world was so far gone that he could do nothing but laugh at it.

His sister Dewey Dell described Darl as someone who "sits at the supper table with his eyes gone farther than the food and the lamp, full of the land dug out of his skull and the holes filled with distance beyond the land." Unlike the other Bundrens, Darl dreams. He speculates. He analyzes. He makes simple observations into profound truths about life. For example, where an ordinary person might say that, after she was soaked in the river, Dewey Dell's dress clings to her, Darl turns that into an observation about the nature of man and the insanity of the senses: "Squatting, Dewey Dell's wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth." Because he peers so intently at the world around him, refusing to become absorbed either some trade, as his brother Cash does, or in himself, as his brother Jewel and indeed the rest of the family do, the local people consider him "queer, lazy, pottering about the place no better than Anse" -- mistaking his intellectual contemplation with his father's ignorant laziness.

Emotional dysfunction is a characteristic of all the Bundrens, but Darl suffers from a different form of it than the others. Vardaman is still half-formed, Jewel wild and untameable, Dewey Dell confused, Cash more likely to make something than to say something; but Darl has Addie's questioning of the very nature of emotions and relationships. Nonetheless, only Darl appears to have a truly unselfish reaction to Addie's death for what it is; Anse's words after the death of his wife are, "God's will be done. Now I can get them teeth." It is Darl alone who has a distinctly idealistic view of where he should be when his mother dies, which is not out harvesting for an extra three dollars; it is Darl who is moved to visit his mother one more time before he is driven away by the selfish greed of the others. The slightly sanctimonious but good-hearted neighbor lady Cora describes his visit to Addie as the "sweetest thing I ever saw:" "He just stood and looked at his dying mother, his heart too full for words."

Like many idealists, however, Darl is not very well grounded to reality. Cash, the oldest brother and the most stable and solid of all the Bundrens, understands Darl's motivation to finally try and rid the family of their accursed burden, Addie's coffin, even wishes that some natural act would have achieved the same ends, but stops short of condoning his brother's deliberate action because it involved tangible harm to other people -- in this case, the loss of a barn and the endangerment of livestock. Darl, however, envisions a way in which the world could be better -- and lacking that inhibitions that distinguishes thoughtful men from true idealists, he acts upon his idea. In part, it is Darl's very idealism that defeats him, for in envisioning a saner world he neglected to plan for the interests of the other inhabitants of his own.

This is not to say that circumstance did not also conspire to thwart the dreamer, however; the hellish reality of the botched stream crossing caused Darl to look at the real world as unreality, the chaotic efforts to regain Addie's coffin and Cash's tools as "peaceful, like machinery... after you have watched it and listened to it for a long time." Time is a great factor against him; the forty mile trip drags on and on, until buzzards circle the cart and the smell of the corpse becomes overpowering. While pouring cement onto Cash's leg Darl hints at his frustration with the words: "If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time." Darl's undoing comes not because reality is so harsh but because he must endure a far harsher, far crazier reality far longer than he can handle as a sensitive idealist.

Darl is an idealist, and rural Mississippi in the 1930's is not kind to sensitive dreamers. The Bundren family is even less kind to him, and it is when the family is revealed in its full dysfunctionality during the protracted trip to Jefferson that Darl finally realizes that the rest of the world is, indeed, insane, and that he can do nothing with it but laugh at it. For in the real world, in the land of the blind, the one eyed-man goes mad.