In William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the Bundren family lives in the rural South of the early 1900s. After the death of Addie, the mother of the Bundren children, the rest of the family takes on an arduous journey to take her to her grave in Jefferson. Addie's death also triggers individual mind journeys for the Bundren children, some of whom begin to grapple with ideas of existentialism. As each character's interpretations of the surrounding world evolve throughout their journey, the way the characters perceive each other also changes. Thus As I Lay Dying discusses identity not only through introspection, but also through the eyes of others. In particular, Vardaman's repetition and syntax show how his confusion about the existence of others reveals the instability of others' existence and identity. Vardaman's syntax, repetition, and panicked tone following Addie's death indicate that Vardaman enters an outwardly focused existential crisis. At the moment Addie dies, Vardaman says that the fish he caught earlier are “all cut up into non-fish now. [He] can feel the bed and her face and theirs and [he] can feel the floor shaking” (53). Parallel to Addie's death, the distinction between "fish" and "non-fish" reveals the confusion Vardaman faces in digesting the concept of death: since "non-fish" serves as a euphemism for dead fish, Vardaman exposes the lack of understanding he has of his mother's death. This confusion also arises from the lack of punctuation in Vardaman's last sentence, which expresses panic and shows the chaos invading Vardaman's mind. This last sentence also reveals Vardaman's panic through the “shaking of the floor”, the dramatic connotation of which illustrates the anguish in his mind. By refocusing Vardaman's confusion over Addie's death... halfway through the sheet of paper, Jewel and Cash's identities take on fragile and unstable qualities. With his existential crisis precipitated by his mother's death, Vardaman demonstrates through his panicked syntax the impermanence and fragility of identities. Since Vardaman is a child and the most impressionable of the Bundren, he easily absorbs and clearly reflects his family's concept of identity, thus establishing the impermanence of identity as one of the main themes of As I Lay Dying. With its fluctuating and identity-challenged qualities, the impermanence of identity embodies the essence of early 1900s Modernism. In this modernist spirit, Faulkner illustrates the futility of trying to consolidate one's identity, drawing on to sentiments from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, in which Hester's identity is at the mercy of the multilayered, fluctuating judgment of the Puritan community..