Section 57 gives the casual reader the impression that perhaps Darl is insane. But the careful reader has seen Darl's intricate reasoning powers earlier in the book. As Darl looks at his predicament, he laughs to himself about the absurdity of it all. One might say that his position is so absurd that he must laugh or else really lose his sanity.
The reader must also recreate the exact nature of the scene that Darl sees, and then the reader will realize that this scene is innately comic. Perhaps here Darl laughs because he realizes how fortunate he is to escape from this bizarre Bundren world.
In the last two sections, Faulkner is showing the reader the type of world or family which Darl is escaping from. In this section, we see that while Anse has been murmuring platitudes about how a man should respect a dead woman, he has actually been preparing to marry the "duck-shaped woman." And the reader, who knows the Bundrens now, would have to agree that a sensitive person such as Darl is indeed better off anywhere rather than with the Bundrens.
