As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
...nce anyway. Instead, Anse insists over and over that he did not "begrudge her that" burial in Jefferson, most likely to assuage his own internal feelings of impatience to get the horrible task done with so he could find someone new to cook his dinners and clean up after him, and also go buy a set of false teeth. This also trivializes Addie's death; by Anse's worrying about getting a new set of choppers, the gravity of her death is lightened, because Anse wants to be able to chew his food like "God intended," and Addie is slowly pushed to the background. This in effect made Anse seem like the sort of person convinced only with his own self-serving nature and nothing else. Faulkner does this because he wishes the reader to see the death of a dear and loved wife be mocked and ridicule and shamed by the constant, eternal desire to have new teeth, and by this, perhaps the reader can learn from it and all the human compassion that Anse lacked could be absorbed by the reader. The character of Jewel is one that is seen from many different angles and perspectives, both as a hard working, stubborn young man and as a violent young man, unloved and misunderstood and prone to setting barns on fire. This also seems rather comical, except for when you look deeper into the situation and see that he really is a boy that was unloved in his childhood and was always in competition for his mother's love with his two older brothers, and when you consider the fact that he spent more time, money and effort into horses than anything else in the world, it seems even more pathetic and hopeless. Jewel is a boy who fought to find an identity among the humans in his life, and, therein lacking one, found it instead in his horse "friends." The scene of the barn burning could have been absolutely horrible, with the animals dying and burning to death, their flesh being seared and charred off, very crispy and flaky, with many groans and moans of pain and suffering from cows, but instead the description of it through Darl's eyes and mind made it seem like an elaborate play or dramatization, in which his amusement was the only means by which things should occur. So when his brother, in an act of violence, sets fire to the barn, it is really no cause for too much alarm, because it was really all just a game anyway, or, in other words, "Life is cabaret, old chum," life is just a game, bowl of cherries, box of chocolates; however and whatever is being said, life is not to be taken seriously. As in Cabaret, images of beauty and entertainment shadow and hide those of horror and death and mutilation and genocide, because as mortal, finite creatures of consciousness, humans hate to face their mortal, finite qualities that are specifically inherent in part of being human, or anything living at all. Part of life is comedy; part of life is grotesque. Having one without the other is a fault and...