Again the reader is involved with another question, that is, is this section the height of comedy or is it extremely pathetic? Most people would agree with the combined qualities of both the comic and the pathetic. But how is one to respond to a comic assertion by a confused young boy that his dead mother is a fish?
Vardaman’s attack on Cora and his running away are additional suggestions that he does not understand the idea of his mother’s death and knows no conventional way in which to express the grief that he does not understand. His confusion will continue until after Addie is buried.
Tull’s narration also conveys some important factual information. We find out that the bridge is washed out, necessitating a longer trip down the river that will require extra time. We find out that Addie has been in the coffin three days before Darl and Jewel get back with the wagon. And in a hot Mississippi July rainy spell, this is a long time to have a dead body above ground. We receive more facts about the perfection with which the coffin was built.
Other than the factual information, we also receive certain impressions. Armstid, a new character introduced in this section, suggests that the Bundrens would do much better if they would bury Addie Bundren in the nearest town. This suggestion prepares us for the fact that the body will indeed be in the advanced stages of decay before they can possibly reach Jefferson and the burial ground that Addie has requested.
Perhaps the most grotesque bit of information conveyed in this section is Tull’s narration of how Vardaman bored a hole into the coffin and in doing so actually bored some holes into his mother’s face. Again, as in Section 16, the reader must formulate an individual response to such an episode, which contains both the potentially comic and the potentially tragic. Under any circumstances it is one of the most ironic scenes in the novel since this bizarre episode is narrated by the dull and unimaginative Tull.
It is also comic that Cash’s precision will let him give the exact distance that he fell when he broke his leg. That Cash has broken a leg previously is important to know since later on when he breaks the same leg trying to rescue the coffin, Anse will say that it is lucky that he broke the same leg that had previously been broken. But also Cash’s giving the exact measurement of the distance that he fell when he broke his leg emphasizes that Cash exists in a world of well-regulated fact, and that he is concerned with how well the coffin is made according to balance, measurement, and weight.
In Section 21, narrated by Darl, three important thematic ideas are employed: Jewel as wooden, Jewel’s mother as a horse, and Darl without a mother. Darl’s taunt that Jewel’s mother is a horse indicates that Jewel devotes all the love he possesses for his mother on the horse. The horse has become a type of mother symbol, but only Darl is perceptive enough to be aware of this. However, Darl does not realize that when Jewel was conceived, Addie thought of Jewel as being conceived in violence. Therefore, the symbol of the horse, a violent and untamed horse, as the symbol of the mother conforms with the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jewel and also answers the question of why Jewel himself expresses his love in terms of violence.
Jewel is constantly depicted by Darl and to a lesser degree by other characters as having a wooden appearance. In this section alone he is described both as “wooden-backed” and “wooden-faced.” This wooden imagery contrasts ironically with Jewel’s violent and agitated motions.
Darl’s realization that he cannot love his mother because he has no mother is also a perceptive realization that will become clear later. When we come to Addie’s section, we find that Addie rejected Darl before he was born because she realized that a birth could not “violate” her aloneness. And since she did reject Darl, this is represented in Darl’s sense of rejection by his mother. This thought will be developed much more fully in later sections but is introduced here.
Section 22, narrated by Cash, emphasizes again that Cash is concerned only with one thing, the immediate construction of the coffin. In terms of the later action of the novel, Cash’s emphasis that the coffin will not ride on a balance is partly justified since we can assume that the loss of the coffin in the river is due in part to the fact that it was not riding on a balance.
Even though this is a short section and the person to whom Cash is talking is not identified, we can easily assume that the person is Jewel because of the violence of his language and his predilection for action rather than talk and analysis. The same type of violent language is picked up in the next section, Section 23, which is narrated by Darl and which records Jewel’s furious and desperate movements, which serve to replace any type of verbal expression of grief. Jewel’s actions, then, are seen in terms of despair and fury and his only comments are curse words, indicating once again that he can find no adequate way of expressing his grief for his mother’s death.
