Faulkner Refutes the Persistence of Memory (or at least intimacy)

One theme that struck me as crucially important to the plot of As I Lay Dying was the relative impermanence of even the most imtimate relationships.  When Addie dies, for most of the characters in the novel, it seems like she crosses an indefinable threshold from personhood to thinghood.  The person they knew and loved just hours earlier is now an object, something to be stored in a coffin the way shoes are stored in a closet.  Darl and Vardaman take this to existential extremes; is Addie now just an elemental lump?  If mother has died, and does not exist, do you have no mother, and therefore also cease to exist?

Anse, for his part, seems incredibly selfish; he is more preoccupied with acquiring new teeth than with mourning his wife and comforting his children.  The fact that he finds a new Mrs. Bundren (what his wife was called so shortly ago) while gathering shovels to bury Addie in Jefferson seems to put the final nail in the coffin, as it were, of this novel's often cynical, always introspective treatment of death.