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.
