Almost all of the main characters in As I Lay Dying are incredibly strange from an outside perspective. Growing up physically and metaphorically separated from a lot of people, the Bundren family's idiosyncrasies are exaggerated. Anse's preoccupation with his teeth, laziness, and self-pity are strengthened by the other members of his family and neighbors doing all of the work around the farm. Vardaman's preoccupation with his mother as a fish is ignored by almost everyone, save for Darl, who encourages it and adds that Jewel's mother is a horse. Cash is perhaps the most normal of the family, and yet he throws himself into building the coffin, obsessing over making it perfect. To almost every outside perspective, the Bundrens appear cartoonish, disrespectful, strange, and often unsettling. The first point of view character who didn't know the Bundrens beforehand, Armstid, says in his chapter that the Bundrens "wouldn't even stay, and that boy chasing them bu