Apparently his grief is of the sort that is suffocating, or, in other words, he associates the idea of suffocation with the idea that his mother is now suffocating in a coffin. Consequently, when they finally put Addie in the coffin, Vardaman's various associations between breathing, the dead fish, his dead mother, and so forth, cause him to think of his mother as a fish that is unable to breathe in the small coffin. Therefore, he bores holes through the coffin so that his mother can breathe, but in doing so he also bores holes in his mother's face.
This scene embraces then both the comic in a gothic and grotesque way, and the tragic in a pathetic way. Vardaman cannot express his grief and is so neglected as a child that in trying to help his mother and in trying to alleviate his own sense of grief, he unintentionally mutilates the dead body of his own mother. Perhaps part of the greatness of the novel is that the reader does not know how to respond to such a scene, whether the response should be one of horrified tragedy over the ultimate and final result, or whether one should respond with a grotesque comic view of the entire episode.
The fact that Faulkner allows Vernon Tull to narrate this bizarre section adds to the confusion of our response. The reason that Tull narrates this section is that he is such a dull person, therefore emphasizing the contrast between Tull as a dull and objective narrator and the bizarre aspect of the scene that he narrates. These two elements then complement one another; that is, the scene is so bizarre that it gains in effect by being reported in a quiet, unemotional, and objective manner.
