s Prufrock, what do we then have?
             We see that this "violence" is an epiphenomenon of a kind of innocence. Prufrock notes the nature of the dawn in a very natural and spontaneous manner; it is not his fault that he feels how he does and therefore experiences his impressions in a shocking and original manner. The same goes for the Bundren family: they are naked, and only on account of being such do they seems shocking to us, do their thoughts strike us with a ambiguous energy that is at once harrowing and adequate. For example, using an excerpt of Faulkner novel as an ensign or representative of what we are discussing, we read these words (spoken by Addie Bundren): "[I] learned that words are no good; that words don't ever fit for what they are trying to say at...I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who had never had the pride." Within the context of this specific narrative we are accosted by a woman whose take on motherhood is brutally honest. But there is more: she feels that she has fallen pray to words. Like people who fall pray to the illusions of religion and just wait for heaven to alight from time's end or their own on account of what a local preacher says, Addie feels that her soul has been devoured by a truly catholic (not in the religious sense of the term) betrayal that is one with the nature of human discourse. Words cannot tell or get at what they refer to (to borrow a mode of speaking that is perhaps in the spirit of Addie Bundren)- there is always a cleavage between sign and signified, a cleavage that "knowledge" cannot repair because it is "knowledge" that has created the rift in the first place. The only way to bridge this yawning distance between sign and signified is through violence. What is this ...