Vardaman page 53

“Then I begin to run. I run toward the back and come to the edge of the porch and stop. Then I begin to cry. I can feel where the fish was in the dust. It is cut up into pieces of not-fish now, not-blood on my hands and overalls. Then it wasn’t so. It hadn’t happened then. And now she is getting so far ahead I cannot catch her.” (page 53)
In this quote, the fish that Vardaman caught is a metaphor for his mother. He talks about the fish as it is no longer living, and emphasizes its lifelessness by adding “not” before all the traits that describe life. The fish is used to represent his mother because it is something he was proud of, and this is shown when he tried to show his father the big fish he discovered and was shot down by his father who seemed unimpressed. This is much like his mother, for whom his father feels little affection for, and doesn’t show any compassion towards. Also, the fish was something Vardaman was proud of, not necessarily cared for, which shows the hollowness in the love in this family. They don’t really love Addie, they just admire her for all the things she was good at. Because of this, the fish metaphor depicts how the family doesn’t truly care about her, but rather what she did for them. The metaphor of the fish resembling his mother is tied in the last line, where he makes reference to his mother dying, saying he can no longer catch her, because she has gone off to heaven.
Much like Vardaman is Will Smith in the movie I Am Legend. In the movie, he has a dog Sam which to him represents his family which dies, but also it represents his sanity because after the dog dies, he finds it hard to grasp reality. The dog is kind of a false sense of security, much like the fish was for Vardaman, but once he loses it he realizes things aren’t as they seem. He can’t hold it together once the dog dies, much like Vardaman after the situation with the fish and his mothers death occurs.