Faulkner obviously loved to play with the question of time and space, effectively seen in The Sound and the Fury. But I love this passage in As I Lay Dying, where Addie’s youngest boy, Vardaman, runs from the room just as she has died:
Then I begin to run. I run toward the back and come to the edge of the porch and stop. Then I begin to cry. I can feel where the fish was in the dust. It is cut up into pieces of not-fish now, not-blood on my hands and overalls. Then it wasn’t so. It hadn’t happened then. And now she is getting so far ahead I cannot catch her. (p. fifty-three)
Vardaman is referring to a fish he’d caught earlier that his father, Anse, made him gut by himself. He is about eleven years old, and his concept of life and death is likening his mother to the fish, the place where the fish was flopping alive just a bit ago, and his mother was still breathing. A child’s wonder at the passing of time and of life, and yet are we ever resolved as adults to an answer?
NOTE ADDED: Guess I nailed it:
Vardaman: My mother is a fish. (p. 85)
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
My mother is dead. My mother is a fish.
I love this figure writing.