Faulkner's As I Lay Dying Essay

Grief often affects young children in instances such as losing a parent, sibling, grandparent, or someone of great significance; furthermore, the innocence that children possess often becomes a blockade in their ability to comprehend death and how to move on from it. As a result, children may make connections to the types of death they have seen such as in animals or what they have seen in media. With Vardaman, his association with the fish can be a parallel of his mother looking at him when she passed as pupils relaxed and her body went limp. Children who witness death like this in both sudden and prolonged manners often experience forms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from witnessing something so obscene. The associations that Vardaman

Beginning with Cash being the oldest of the Bundren children and the one who copes with his mother’s death in the most normative way of all the children. Addie’s love for Cash varied from the other children as he was born before she fell out of love with Anse. “Cash had a secure relationship with Addie, and therefore felt secure [in] himself and in his mother’s love for him…[he] unlike the other the other Bundren children, grows as a person from his mother’s death, developing the skills to effectively cope with loss” (Butchart 2015). Cash’s mourning is normative in terms of accepting and growing as a person. He used his mother’s death to focus on his work as a carpenter. He “defined himself by his work, not by his mother…” indicating that he has grown as a person in his journey to cope with his grief. Differing from his siblings, Cash learned to be independent before his mothers passing using his defense mechanisms in healthy ways to cope. However, Cash does use “his ego” to pursue his siblings with resentment and lack of sympathy due to their seemingly lack of care for him building the casket that would hold their