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In As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner writes each chapter through a different character’s point of view, varying narrative with dialogue. Faulkner may specifically have chosen this technique in As I Lay Dying to reveal, through the words of his characters Dewey Dell and Vardaman, the Bundren cow as a symbol for Addie (37, 41-42, 171). Faulkner’s two characters repeat specific words and phrases when describing each of their interactions with the cow. This marks both the similarity of emotion that they feel toward Addie and the different situation in which her death has left them both. Faulkner uses the cow as a symbol for Addie, stressed by repetition, to strengthen the maternal bond between Dewey Dell and Vardaman, to illustrate Dewey Dell’s pregnancy, and Vardaman’s acceptance of Dewey Dell as surrogate after his mother’s death.
Vardaman and Dewey Dell’s encounters with the cow reveal the differing degrees of anger and acceptance of the two characters’ of their mother’s death. Vardaman sees the cow after his rampage through the barn and angrily rejects the cow, “I aint a-goin to milk you. I aint a-goin to do nothing for them” (37). He refuses to comfort the cow, just as Anse put off calling the doctor until it was too late for Addie. But then Vardaman narrates, “she is just behind me with her sweet , hot, hard
breath. . . .She nudges me , snuffing. She moans deep inside” (37). Yet the cow affords Vardaman some comfort and allows him, finally, to cry. As Dewey Dell approaches the barn, “The cow lows at the foot of the bluff. She nuzzles at me, snuffing, blowing her breath in a sweet, hot blast, through my dress, against my hot nakedness, moaning” (41). Both characters use the same words, “sweet,” “hot,” “snuffing;” and similar words, “nudges” and “nuzzles” and “moans” and “lows.” The language, far beyond the scope of the vocabulary Vardaman and Dewey Dell have displayed in previous chapters, was specifically chosen by Faulkner to interconnect the passages. Dewey Dell rejects the cow for different reasons than Vardaman. She says, “You’ll just have to wait. What you got in you aint nothin to what I got in me” (42). Though Dewey Dell mourns for the loss of her mother she immediately assumes the maternal role and is aware that her pregnancy is now a priority.
Faulkner, using structure, intentionally places these two chapters together to illustrate the almost identical experience Dewey Dell and Vardaman have with the cow. Vardaman narrates, “It is dark. I can hear wood, silence . . .” (38). And Dewey Dell narrates, “the darkness rushes on . . .filled with wood and silence” (41). The cow moaning for tender loving care, and leaving them alone in the “darkness” and “silence” strengthens the development of a maternal bond between Dewey Dell and Vardaman. When Dewey Dell finds Vardaman taking his anger about Addie’s death against the horses, she accepts the job as Vardaman’s surrogate mother, and comforts him, “You stop it, now. Right this minute. You’re fixing to make yourself sick and then you can’t go to town. You go on to the table and eat your supper” (42), the words of a mother guiding her child, not of an older sister consoling her brother.
Faulkner mentions the cow in two other places in the book. First, when Darl lights the barn on fire and Jewel searches for the cow, but it runs back into the barn (148-149). Second, in Vardaman’s last chapter, three chapter’s from the novel’s end, Vardaman waits outside the drugstore while Dewey Dell has sex with MacGowan (171). In the midst of Vardaman’s stream of consciousness narrative, Vardaman suddenly starts talking about “the cow” as if it is the same cow in the barn back on pages 38 and 41, and it has been travelling with them the whole time. In fact, no one else mentions the cow at the end of the novel in their narratives, not even Dewey Dell. The cow is just suddenly there in the middle of his thoughts, “I hear the cow a long time, clopping on the street . . . . Darl She has been in there a long time. And the cow is gone too. A long time.” (171). Vardaman seems to recognize that Addie is gone and that Dewey Dell has a new maternal role, although she’s not there right at the moment, “She has been in there longer than the cow was. But not as long as empty,” (171).
If both Dewey Dell and Vardaman describe their experiences so similarly, we must be close to the truth: that Dewey Dell must take-over the maternal role of the household. Faulkner’s technique allows the reader to learn more about what truly happens than the characters in the novel.
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