Dialectical Journal Chapter 12

In the second chapter dedicated to Vardaman, he found himself captive in his own naïve and childish imagination. While staring at the coffin that Cash had created and being not fully aware of his mother’s condition, he got scared at the thought that the members of the family would have to nail shut the casket and that his mother would have no air to breathe. Until the end of the chapter, it became obvious that the child did not believe that Addie was dead and that he made incredible efforts to hold on to his beliefs:

And tomorrow it will be cooked and et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there won’t be anything in the box and so she can breathe. (Faulkner 30)

The shortest intervention of Vardaman is the chapter in which
Jewel, Anse’s bastard child, went to the barn, and when Anse called after him, Jewel did not respond. After Darl said that Jewel’s mother was a horse, Vardaman became intrigued by that thought and he wondered if that meant his mother was a horse too, but Darl assured him otherwise. Moreover, Vardaman noticed that Anse found disrespectful the fact that Cash brought his toolbox so he could work on Tull’s house and, also, the fact that Dewey Dell brought a package of Mrs. Tull’s cakes to deliver to town. In other words, the child found himself in the middle of adult matters which he keenly
Moreover, the smell of decomposing flesh was not a familiar scent for the boy and he repeated again the leitmotif “My mother is a fish.”, waiting for her to come out of the water. The image of the mother is created with the help of the memories that the members of the family have of her. Even if she is dead, she is an important character of the novel because most of the thoughts of the other characters are related to her. Faulkner uses the same technique in his short story ”A Rose for Emily” when he creates the image of the protagonist by using what the people gathered at her funerals think about her. In both texts we can talk about multiperspectivism and about Faulkner`s ingeniosity in creating different types of characters.
Vardaman needed to escape the chain of unfortunate events and situations requiring a high level of maturity, so he found a way to regain his childish balance by following buzzards after sundown in his seventh chapter. His action could also be interpreted as a metaphor for some quest to find where did the souls go in the afterlife:

Tonight I am going to see where they stay while we are in the barn. (Faulkner