Vardaman

This is the most incomprehensible novel I have encountered in this class so far. Though I concluded the novel with a superficial understanding of each of the characters and found some humor and weight in the novel’s closing sentence (uttered by the despicable Anse Bundren), I am still unclear as to the overall message. Why was it written? What does it all mean? Not that it is relevant, but I did not enjoy it. Not that my opinion matters in light of the genius who is Faulkner, but I think I would have “given more of a damn” about this family if I could have experienced their plight through the eyes of one narrator. Or, at least, less narrators.

Because I am apparently not very intelligent, I could not identify a theme on which to base my response. Therefore, I decided to try focusing on one character. I chose Vardaman.

Vardaman, the youngest of the Bundrens, is the only member of the bunch who can truly be called a child. However, we are first introduced to Vardaman with the following description from Tull:

“That boy comes up the hill. He is carrying a fish nigh long as he is. He slings it to the ground and grunts “Hah” and spits over his shoulder like a man.”

This is not the only mention of Vardaman sharing common characteristics with a much older person than he. Shortly after, Tull says, “He cusses [the fish] like a grown man…”

Vardaman is much younger than his brothers, which could account for the fact that he adopts a man’s mannerisms at a very young age. However, Vardaman loses his crass confidence once his mother dies, and the fish that he once flung so carelessly to the ground, that he so easily chopped into a bloody mess, becomes entwined in his concept of his own mother’s death:

“My mother is a fish.”

The fish seems to represent, to Vardaman, that which existed in one state being altered to another state (“it is cut up into pieces of not-fish now”). It seems to be his young way of handling, yet not fully accepting, his mother’s death: “It was not my mother…It was not her because it was laying right yonder in the dirt. And now it’s all chopped up.”

The idea of the fish comes back to Vardaman in the river-crossing scene:

“You know she is a fish, but you let her get away.”

Because of the great power that water holds in this novel, it seems that there is more to the fish than serving as a coping mechanism for Vardaman. Water adds to the life struggle of the Bundrens, while containing a sense of otherworldly eternity and mystery. Perhaps, then, Vardaman is onto something bigger than he knows (or I currently know) when he says that his mother is a fish. Somehow, his mother, existing now outside of “straight” Time, makes sense as a fish, flowing through the great mystery of water.

Surprisingly, innocent Vardaman adds an element of horror to the novel. The blood on his person when he slaughters the fish is a rare description of gore in the novel. And while his face is often described as “round,” once his mother dies his face takes on horrific qualities: “…all color draining from his face into his mouth, as though he has by some means fleshed his own teeth in himself, sucking.”

Throughout the remainder of the novel, Vardaman seems to have forgotten his mother’s death. He is focused on a shiny, new toy train in a store window. He recites profound information about his family members to himself in a seemingly detached way, without seeming to fully comprehend any of it. His mother’s death, while upsetting his carefree innocence, has also, interestingly, given him a childlike approach to the world that he did not possess before – back when he was a spittin’ and cussin’ man-boy.