These words belong to Vardaman, the youngest son of the Bundren family. When his mother, Addie Bundren, dies, he cannot begin to understand her death and keeps repeating things that make no sense to those around him: that his mother is a fish, that she died because the fish was cut into pieces. Unable to climb the enormous wall called death with his small mind, Vardaman desperately imagines what might lie beyond it.
When we confront something we cannot understand, we naturally begin imagining what lies beneath it. We strain to grasp whatever blocks our sight and struggle to climb over the wall. Some give up from exhaustion; some finally manage to cross it after tremendous effort; others live on preserving their fantasies of what lies beyond. Strictly speaking, Vardaman belongs to the last group.
The “fish,” then, symbolizes not only his mother herself but also Vardaman's despair at her death, or perhaps the excessive hope born from that despair. I look forward to seeing how this confusion is resolved or intensified as the story progresses.
What, then, is the “fish” in our own lives? What can we understand, and what remains beyond our comprehension? What does our dust-sized existence suggest about our ability to understand the world? Perhaps life, however short, is a continuous journey of crossing and recrossing countless walls.