While death is certainly a central theme in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, so is grief. The byproduct of Addie Bundren’s death are the various ways in which her children cope with it, which connects to what Peabody states, “When I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind-and that of the minds of the ones who suffer bereavement” (AILD 44). While each Bundren has their own coping mechanism, the two monologues which most juxtapose each other are Darl and Vardaman’s.
Darl deals with his mother’s death internally and mentally, questioning his own and his mother’s existence. This ontological thinking is not secluded to Darl, as we also see Vardaman attempting to ponder his existence, and his mother’s aquatic form. The purpose which serves, as Carolyn Porter states, “…to reestablish both their individual identities and their family relations” (68). However, because Darl is older than Vardaman, we see how his inner monologue is notably more mature and therefore more pronounced in his metaphysical discourse. Darl reasons, “In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not” (AILD 80). As if he were a a philosopher, the death of his mother pushes him to question his existence and then reject his mother overall stating, “I cannot love my mother because I have no mother” (AILD 95). Both Darl’s questions of being and of his mother’s existence work to make his character powerful. As Porter writes, “Always uncertain of his own being, he is compelled to reach out and connect with the world through a vividly sensory imagination in order to know that he “is”” (70). In a similar fashion, Vardaman does the same.
Vardaman is the youngest Bundren, and although Faulkner never explicitly mentions his age, one discerns that he is a child (probably in single digits in terms of age). Despite his age, Vardaman is aware of his mother’s death and is evidently affected by it. He copes both physically and mentally, but most notably by asserting that his mother is a “fish.” Because Vardaman is younger than Darl, his monologue is not as mature or pronounced and so his way of making sense of his mother’s death is through the image of the fish that he caught in the beginning of the novel. It is satirical, yet it also works to make us think about language and its limitations. Porter speaks of this when she writes, “Faulkner is deliberately dramatizing the gap between words and experience in the conventional realist sense, but in the interest of a more committed realism” (83). While we may find it sardonic for Vardaman to think of his mother as a fish, this assertion is due to his lack of sufficient language to express himself in a serious manner. This irony of language is explored by Porter when she states, “He may lack the vocabulary invoked here, but he does not lack a grasp of what he is experiencing-an “is different from my is,” a body that is alien to his. The brilliant metaphorical description here is born of terror and signals an unjustly accelerated introduction to being separate and alone” (84). Like Darl, Vardaman looks within himself and through his imagination he questions his being, as Darl questions his being, only in a childish way. This is not to invalidate or undermine Vardaman’s experience as he is just as philosophical as Darl is when it comes to his inner monologue. Thus when one compares both of their monologues, we see the faint similarities in their stream of thought and how they juxtapose each other.
