My Mother Is a Fish

Death is most commonly portrayed as the end of life, or for the sake of depth, a permanent termination of all vital functions. This appears to be a fairly simple concept and, whether or not they understand it, people eventually accept it because it is inevitable. Humans find it difficult to define death; especially when it is so closely associated with life as well. Some define death as the moment when life concludes, while others define it as when the condition that follows life begins. In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Vardaman Bundren has a intriguing, yet misconceived, viewpoint of death that is demonstrated when he equates his mother’s death with that of a fish, assumes that she still has the ability to breathe and swim even after her death, and blames Dr. Peabody for the death simply because he was tending to her at the time.

For the young, grasping concepts as expansive as death is often nearly impossible. Vardaman Bundren, the youngest in his family, is having a difficult time coping with, or even understanding, his mother’s death. The rest of his family is too preoccupied with their own misunderstandings and problems to attempt to explain death to him. Consequently, the phrase “My mother is a fish” appears several times and becomes significantly more important than the reader expects (84). Because Vardaman catches and kills a fish on the day Addie Bundren dies, he associates her passing away with the death of the fish. This is a feasible theory for him to grasp considering he realizes that both the fish and his mother no longer exist so, within the realm of his mentality, they must be the same. In his point of view, nothing was more comparable to his mother than the fish. For example, “It [fish] slides out of his h...

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... to explain and try to get someone to associate something with death when they had never seen or experienced anything like it. Because most of the members of the Bundren family were a bit isolated to themselves, Vardaman did not have someone to explain matters of life and death to him. Therefore, he went about it in his own way. He associated death with death because he saw that a fish had died and a little while later, he discovered that his mom died and thus a connection was born. Vardaman also attempted to comfort his mother by making her ventilation holes in her coffin. This was his way of rescue and his attempt to make her situation better. His adolescence is shown when he thinks that Addie could swim out of her casket while she was in water. The reader is constantly reminded of the boy’s young age and constant struggle to come to terms with life and death.