Jewel offers one humorous insight into the character of Cash, prompted by the fact that Cash, the most literal-minded of the children, is actually building the coffin under Addie's window. Jewel recalls that when Cash was young, his mother asked him to bring her some fertilizer from the barnyard and he took the bread pan and brought it back filled with dung. This illustrated Cash's literal-mindedness and prepares us for some of his later sections where we see him functioning only on a very literal level.
With the above incident, Faulkner introduces us to one of the interesting techniques in the novel: the juxtaposition of something that is extremely serious — the building of the coffin — with something that is inordinately comic — collecting dung in a bread pan. The juxtaposition illustrates how Jewel is trying to express his deep emotional love for his mother and his resentment that Cash is building the coffin under her window, as though he were anxious for her to die so that he can see what a good job he has done. Yet to express his idea, Jewel resorts to a comic scene involving Cash as a young boy bringing dung in a bread pan.
Throughout the entire novel, we will have many comic aspects juxtaposed with a potentially tragic scene. The structure of the novel depends heavily upon this tragic-comic combination, and it is sometimes difficult to analyze our response to such scenes.
