Vardaman is the youngest of the Bundren crew, and he takes his mothers death the hardest. He does not know where to place the blame. The book never mentions his age, but it is estimated that he is probably around twelve years old based on the way he talks. He is young and does not fully understand human death.
Vardaman is trying to make sense of his mother’s death after she passes away. To cope with this, he compares her to a rabbit that they found dead in the dirt. The rabbit scene begins on page 65, and ends on page 67. This section is all from Vardaman’s point of view, and he mentions rats, rabbits, and possums in this section. Animals are something that Vardaman can understand. He is unable to understand death, because he has never experienced it besides in the form of an animal. He does not want his mother to be nailed up in the coffin, because he compares it to a rabbit being trapped in a cage. He then further explains how if his mother is trapped up in a cage like a rabbit, then she is a rabbit. He talks about how the rabbit was a rabbit, but now it is in the kitchen in the bleeding pan. He compares the rabbit to his mom and states, “Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t” (67). He is explaining how the same thing happened to his mom, that happened to the rabbit. One moment they were normal, and the next they were not. The rabbit was waiting to be cooked and eaten, while his mother was waiting to be buried, and she would soon be trapped like the rabbit.
Further in the passage, Vardaman states, “I can get Vernon. He was there and he seen it, and with both of us it will be and then it will not be” (67). Vardaman was with Vernon (Tull) when he found the rabbit, so he is hoping to relive the situation in order to try and make sense of it.
The theme of animals and Vardaman appears to be popular so far in the novel. Faulkner did a good job of using animals as a way for Vardaman to cope, since he is so young. He is experiencing death through something he understands as a twelve year old boy, even though his reasoning might not make sense to the people around him.
Thanks for drawing our attention to this complex passage. The one thing you might have overlooked is the way the introduction of the rabbit is over-layed with the earlier image of the fish that Tull saw him bring up. The whole passage seems to relate to Vardaman’s coming to term with death, as you say, of his mother in particular, but also in relation to other animals. He seems to recall being told that a rabbit who died had gone in another farm to some other place (heaven? beyond town?). He also sees how he physically changed the fish from one form (whole) to another (chopped up and ready to eat). If this is a passage attempting to reflect a boy’s inability to understand death, and to draw in materials facts he has witnessed to understand death in the absence of any knowledge imparted by his family, then it makes sense that it remains a suggestive patchwork of finely imbricated remembrances and half-thoughts. I’d like to work through this one as a class, though, to see how far we can get between its efforts at sense-making and its intractable difficulty. As you say, his reasoning may not make sense to those around him–including us!
When engaging passages like this, feel free to quote at more length just so there’s more to sort of hang your analytical insights on.