Anse Bundren doesn’t understand the concept of responsibility unless it is to make demands of the people around him. Whether he is aware of it or not, he takes advantage of his status as patriarch. As Carolyn Porter describes, “Consider that he does no real work. He depends on his children, his neighbors, and the good Lord to take care of him” (79). His only action is to reject help as a show of his pride. The death of his wife, Addie, comes as a result of not sending for a doctor sooner.
The fact that he does not take responsibility for her death is apparent in two places. First when he says, “God’s will be done” (AILD 52) right after Addie’s death. Second and more significant is before her death in an interaction with Vardaman after he cleans the fish he caught, “Vardaman comes around the house, bloody as a hog to his knees… ‘Go wash them hands,’ I say… ‘Pa,’ he says, ‘is ma sick some more?’ ‘Go wash them hands,’ I say” (AILD 38). It is notably odd that even though Vardaman is bloody “to his knees,” Anse only tells him to wash his hands. It is possible to read this in the classic sense of washing one’s hands of metaphorical blood. In other words, cleaning themselves from the responsibility of a killing. On page 37, Anse tried to downplay Addie’s condition to Dr. Peabody. This, combined with how long it took for him to call the doctor, implies he might be suffering from subconscious guilt in his response to Vardaman. Anse’s avoidance of Vardaman’s question of Addie’s status by repeating his command is indicative of this.
Additionally, this is possibly the reason Vardaman becomes fixated with the fish and later associating it with his dead mother. Because Anse told him to only wash his hands along with Vardaman having been the one to have caught the fish in the first place, he could be misplacing the responsibility of the death onto the one who last physically dealt with the deceased. Later Vardaman seems to be having a breakdown in the barn when he repeats, “He kilt her… She never hurt him and he come and kilt her” (AILD 63) about the doctor. Doctors often deal with patients by surgically opening them up to fix them. However, it seems that Vardaman’s earlier act of cleaning and gutting the fish became associated with the doctor’s role of surgeon. He thinks that just like he killed the fish, the doctor killed his mother. The concept of blood guilt could have been introduced to him first by his father, Anse, because he was told by him to wash his hands even though he was almost entirely covered in blood.
This shows the dysfunction of the Bundren household. Through Anse making demands without partaking in his responsibilities, his children have twisted misperceptions of themselves and their roles. Vardaman, in particular, is actively processing what blood guilt means by equating his mother to a fish. This is the result of his father’s inability to take responsibility.
