The Bundren Family

The chapter forces the reader, as does the rest of the book, to fair his or her accept soul and demands a human and apparitional response to a set of people who, aside from Darl, pose no notion of selflessness or affirmation of tone. Addie shows in this chapter that she believes she has found the answer to life story, which is comprised of the acceptance of life's harsh reality and death's inevitability. However, she, akin the bulk of her family, has no meaningful or restorative concept of spirituality or of a reason beyond one's own pitiful confusion. These factors force the reader to make decisions and judgments not still with respect to the truthfulness of the conflicting accounts, but even more than(prenominal) importantly to the emotional realities this family and its mother/center express. Does the reader prove Addie for helping to fashion a miserable and bewildered family, or does the reader finally yield to a sense of com offense, or at least pity, for this lost family?

Addie's take on life and death might be considered realistic, but when we compare her consciousness to that of the crumbling Darl, we see the barren nature of the mother. Her "realism" is zero more than a perhaps inevitable outcome of the forces which created her---her miserable, life-hating father, her weak husband, and the inflexible moral code by which she lives and dies and by which she so gratingly legal experts

herself, her life, her family, and finally all life.

I believed that I had found it. I believed that the reason was the traffic to the alive, to the imposinfulnessg blood, the red sulfurous flood boiling through the land.

This is the dry, bitter style of a woman who truly believes that nothing matters, nothing except doing one's duty as a woman---having sex, having babies, clean house, and last: "I gave Anse the children. I did not ask for them. . . . That was my duty to him, . . . and that duty I fulfilled. . . . And . . . I have cleaned my house" (174; 176). Of course, by "cleaning her house" Addie means not only literally, but excessively suffering in silence as a case of doing one's duty as a woman and wife and mother.

Of course, the prerequisite duty she fails to fulfill is loving her children. Again, the question the reader essential answer for himself or herself is whether Addie was ever capable of such love.

However, a word must be said about the resentment always lurking under the surface of this woman's strict bitterness, just as a powerful pressure exists under the lid of a boiling pot. Her reflection on sex with her husband is a high point of the chapter, demonstrating not only the hidden passion repressed in the woman, but also her crippled resume of life as an experience inevitable and profoundly sinful. She sees herself as the victim of Anse, of God, of life itself and all its senseless cruelty:

The "sin" of Addie is not sex, or even her miserable philosophy of life and death, but the damage she has inflicted on her children. She willfully creates a chaw of children who are themselves doomed to repeat her miserable life in their own ways. We may finally choose not to judge her, to leave it up to God, to rather have compassion and/or pity for her, believing that she cannot help who or what she is and what she does or does not do with respect to her children. However, because it is a novel of consciousness and self-knowledge, or the tragic lack thereof, we see
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