As I Lay Down by William Faulkner

Someone once suggests he is a "frightened, perhaps deranged nestling" and she is a " effeminate vegetcapable." These suggestions might be a bit extreme, but by all odds these two Bundren children are the least developed. Vardaman loves his mother but is a pre-teen child. After he catches a big fish he has one chapter where the solo line expressed is "My mother is a fish" (Faulkner 79). This demonstrates his displaced love for his mother has been transferred to the fish as more as Jewel's displaced love for his mother is transferred to his beloved horse. Of course, if Vardaman is non amply individualized it is because there are few support mechanisms in his environment to support him. Faulkner believes few men are big and most are products of biological and psychological determinism coupled with environment. No one is there to nurture or support Vardaman everyplace the loss of his mother, nor even teach him what death means. This is obvious in one of the most grotesque moments of the novel when he drills holes into his mother's coffin, and inadvertently her face, so she can breathe. Some go finished read a Freudian Oedipal interpretation into this moment, but, more accurately it is a child who loves his mother and misunderstands her death to such a degree that he believes drilling holes in the coffin will make her able to breathe, "'Are you going to halt her up in it, silver? Cash? Cash?' I got shut up in

the crib the new door it was too leaden for me it went shut I couldn't breathe because the rat was breathing up all the air. I said ?Are you going to nail it shut, Cash? Nail it? Nail it?'" (Faulkner 62).

Faulkner is a master at presenting reality from the perspective of multiple personalities, including varied levels of abilities and at different stages of development. Vardaman is untested and therefore his development is incomplete, but he as well as borders on idiocy which might be wherefore Faulkner has misspellings, forth of place syntax and a leave out of punctuation triumph his chapters. Unlike Darl, Vardaman does not possess extra-sensory perception or close to other valuable tool of gaining insight into the world and himself.

His only support to endure was his mother, now dead, which is why we still bring out his anguish and fear when her coffin is almost carried off in the flooding river, "he comes a long way up slow before his hands do but he's got to have her got to so I can bear it" (Faulkner 144). Thus, Vardaman is not untold more than a frightened child in this military position but Faulkner's style makes us recognize that most illiterate children without support would be in a similar state. As for being deranged, dysfunctional would be closer to the truth for Vardaman since his faultless family exhibits dysfunction of one sort or another. This could be why Darl comments that Vardaman's face was "fading into the dusk like a eyepatch of paper pasted on a failing seawall" (Faulkner 48).

In conclusion, both Vardaman and Dewey Dell are so young that, of course, they are less individualized than the other members of their dysfunctional family. Faulkner does not judge them nor attempt to persuade us to. Instead, he tries to quicken the irrational mental processes of someone their age going through an emotional trauma and their coping with it even though they lack more sophisticated skills with which to handle it. Dewey Dell is so use and unloved in the novel that she has no a
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