Death is most often described as the end of life or, for the sake of depth, as the permanent end of all vital functions. It seems like a pretty simple concept and, whether they understand it or not, people eventually accept it because it's inevitable. Humans have difficulty defining death; especially when it is so closely associated with life. Some define death as the moment when life ends, while others define it as the moment when the condition that follows life begins. In William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Vardaman Bundren has an intriguing, but misunderstood, view on death which is manifested when he equates his mother's death to that of a fish and assumes that she has always the ability to breathe and swim even after death. , and blames Dr. Peabody for the death simply because he was caring for her at the time. For young people, grasping concepts as broad as death is often almost impossible. Vardaman Bundren, the youngest in his family, has difficulty handling, or even understanding, the death of his mother. The rest of his family is too preoccupied with their own misunderstandings and problems to try to explain the death to him. Therefore, the phrase “My mother is a fish” appears several times and becomes significantly more important than the reader expects (84). Because Vardaman catches and kills a fish on the day Addie Bundren dies, he associates her death with the death of the fish. This is a feasible theory that he can understand given that he realizes that the fish and his mother no longer exist so, in the realm of his mentality, they must be the same. From his point of view, nothing was more comparable to his mother than fish. For example, “It [the fish] slides out of its middle...... into the middle of a paper... to explain and try to get someone to associate something with death while it never seen or experienced anything like this. . Because most of the Bundren family were somewhat isolated, Vardaman had no one to explain matters of life and death to him. So he did it his way. He associated death with death because he saw that a fish had died and soon after he discovered that his mother had died and so a connection was born. Vardaman also tried to comfort his mother by cutting air holes in her coffin. It was his way of saving her and his attempt to improve her situation. His adolescence manifests when he thinks that Addie might swim out of her coffin while she was in the water. The reader is constantly reminded of the boy's young age and his constant struggle to accept life and death..