Loss is a hard pill to swallow, yet the grieving process shows itself in different forms in everyone, whether it comes across as callousness, sorrow, or erratic behavior. Following the death of their mother Addie Bundren, the sporadically similar Bundren family display their personal grief in unique ways that proves quite apparent in Darls passage. Family members like Cash and Jewel take a somber approach, Vardaman capricious, and Anse take a method of indifference. In the novel As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner uses the duality of productivity and idleness in elements of nature and people alike, to show the broadness in approaches to grief different people take. In the Dark passage, Faulkner tends to contrast the use of Cash and his father Anse to help carry out the idea of idleness and productivity. Throughout the passage, Cash constructs his mothers coffin, his one last act of love for her. Anse, in the room with him, contributes next to nothing, besides fetching a coat. Diction, more specifically actions words, are utilized constantly to show their distinction. Cash “labors’, “saws”, and when it begins to rain, he “takes up the saw again”. He …show more content…
Anse only “watches him”, “stirs”, and “muses”. Faulkner does not include many meaningful action words for Anse in the passage to make