One of the first connections I noticed between As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury upon reading the first few chapters of the former is Faulkner’s interest in shifting perspectives, and how different people can view the same situations in such different ways. I find Vardaman’s perspective to be especially interesting (and similar to Benjy’s) in the way that he is trying to make sense of his complicated surroundings with a limited cognitive capacity. While Vardaman’s age is not stated explicitly (or if it is, I must have missed it), I would picture him to be somewhere in the 4-6-age range. Vardaman and Benjy’s narratives are similar in the way that both characters are trying to make sense of the world around them, but fail to accurately understand what is going on. Though in some ways, Benjy’s narrative offers us an unbiased look at the Compson family, it also shows Benjy’s constant confusion. His narrative jumps all over the place, one memory slipping seamlessly into another as words, places, or people remind him of other events. He becomes confused and upset as the golfers yell for their caddies, thinking they are calling out the name of his sister. Vardaman, in trying to make sense of his mother’s death, is also trying to connect different aspects of the world around him in a surreal cause-and-effect stream-of-consciousness. Unlike Benjy, however, Vardaman seems to have strong biases, such as accusing Dr. Peabody of killing his mother.

Much of Vardaman’s narrative finds him trying to make sense of his mother’s death. The way Faulkner writes these sections forces the reader to work from Vardaman’s limited cognitive ability and try to make sense of what he is thinking as he tries to make sense of his surroundings. A good example of this confusion can be found in Vardaman’s second section, when he seems to be trying to make causal connections between the death of his mother and the preparation/cooking of the fish that he caught earlier:

I chopped it up. It’s laying in the kitchen in the bleeding pan, waiting to be cooked and et. Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t. And tomorrow it will be cooked and et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there won’t be anything in the box and so she can breathe (66-7).

I’d be lying if I said I understand this passage, but I keep coming back and re-reading it in hopes of making sense of Vardaman’s thought process. The only conclusion I can take away is that Vardaman is trying to make sense of death. He seems traumatized by the remains of the fish after he chops it up and later he gets upset at Cora for cooking the fish. For some reason he begins to refer to his mother as a fish later in his narrative (84, 101). Perhaps, in trying to make sense of his mother’s death, Vardaman is tracing the timeline of events and making connections between the time of her death and the catching of the fish. Vardaman seems to believe that the woman who died in bed is not his mother and that his mother actually left days before. “It was not her. She went away when the other one laid down in her bed and drew the quilt up” (66). In his confusion, it seems that Vardaman believes that the fish he caught is his mother, and the violence involved in chopping up and cooking the fish is perhaps his way of trying to make sense of the trauma involved in losing one’s mother.

Vardaman’s narrative (like much of Faulkner’s writing) produces more questions than it answers. Why does Darl seem to encourage Vardaman’s thought process in their conversation right before the family leaves on the wagon? “But my mother is a fish,” Vardaman says. “Jewel’s mother is a horse,” Darl replies (101). In his conversation with Darl, Vardaman seems to be trying to make sense of his world by listing facts that he believes to be true and making connections based on those facts:

            But my mother is a fish. Vernon seen it. He was there.

            “Jewel’s mother is a horse,” Darl said.

            “Then mine can be a fish, cant it, Darl?” I said.

            Jewel is my bother.

            “Then mine will have to be a horse, too,” I said.

Part of the reason why Vardaman’s narrative is so confusing is because we are seeing into the thought process of a young boy who does not seem to get very much guidance from his older siblings or parents. He is forced to make sense on his own situation, and in doing so he makes jumbled, inaccurate connections and assumptions about the people and circumstances around him.