Blooms Literary Themes - THE GROTESQUE.pdf - ymerleksi - home

16William Faulknerfor “sitting there, like buzzards” and staring at Addie (15). He hatesDewey Dell’s fanning. He fantasizes about being alone on a highhill with his mother, “and me rolling rocks down the hill at theirfaces, picking them up and throwing them faces and teeth and all byGod. . .” (15)—these are his family members and his helpful neighbors!Later, Jewel will openly insult Vernon Tull by suggesting thathis friendly visit is an intrusion on Addie’s privacy (17). Above all,Jewel hates the sound of Cash’s tools at work on Addie’s coffin rightunder her window “where she can see him” (14). Since everyone butJewel acknowledges that Addie is dying, it is proper for Cash to havebegun work on the coffin. Surely, though, among normal families theproject would be hidden away in the barn rather than set up ten feetfrom the sickbed, intruding on the ceremony of death. So the noise ofcoffin-building provides a soundtrack for the days of the deathwatch.This macabre arrangement culminates in the moments before death,when Addie shouts, “You, Cash!” and looks out the window. The proudcarpenter holds up two boards and mimes the shape of the finishedbox; she looks without reacting, and then she dies (48).Incongruous events continually upset the decorum of death.Earlier that day, the boy Vardaman caught and butchered a huge fish,which he reported was “full of blood and guts as a hog” (38). In a sceneof low comedy, the fat and elderly Doc Peabody has to be hauled upthe steep path to the house by a rope. Anse grumbles about having topay him, while Peabody and the Tulls realize that Anse is too cheap tohave summoned a doctor unless it was already too late to do any good.Then, at the climactic moment of death, the family circle is incompleteor (as we shall see later) deliberately broken. Addie and the third son,Jewel, have loved each other with a furious but unexpressed intensity.As Addie is dying, Dewey Dell says, “It’s Jewel she wants” (47), butJewel is not there because Darl and Jewel have gone off on a trip to sella load of wood for a measly three dollars. Then shortly after the death,and with the trip to Jefferson in prospect, Anse is thinking, “Now I canget them teeth” (52), Vardaman thinks at least briefly about bananasand the toy train, and Dewey Dell broods about an abortion. No doubtthey are all grieving as well, but each has a private, selfish interest thatcontradicts social ideals about how people respond to the death of aloved one.Young Vardaman, the only son to witness Addie’s death directly,goes wild with grief and traduces the funerary atmosphere with a