Faulkner explains the majority of the story through the characters’ perceptions, or past experiences. A common theme Faulkner illustrates is isolation and alienation throughout the Bundrens, especially during the journey. Every character is essentially isolated from the others; moreover, the characters in the novel do not effectively communicate with one another. Although the reader is privy to the characters’ thoughts and emotional responses, none of the characters adequately expresses their dilemmas or desires to others. Many of the Bundren kids were static, except for Vardaman and Darl. The alterations in these characters were foreshadowed by their thoughts and actions. Out of the Bundren Children, Darl and Jewel are the two characters described as round, …show more content…
Addie’s one simple wish to be buried in Jefferson, steered the entire novel into treacherous waters, and eventually to the unexpected calamity of the Bundren’s self-destruction. Even as Addie laid in the coffin on the journey to Jefferson, the family had many more motives than to just rightfully bury Addie. Faulkner emphasizes the cliché of women in the era by over exaggerating Addie and Dewey Dell’s roles. Dewey Dell, the only daughter in the Bundren family, is expected as the only Bundren woman, to usurp her mother’s job after she dies and raise the family at the age of seventeen as the matriarch. Women were rarely seen as anything but child reproduction machines. Dewey Dell had a fling with Lafe and later finds out she is pregnant. Throughout the novel, other characters look down upon her because of her wish to terminate the pregnancy to avoid entering the never-ending cycle of a farmer’s housewife. Dewey Dell was observed, “Squatting, Dewey Dell’s dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of