James Agee Death In The Family

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Death is the most common part of life. There is not a single living thing that will not experience it. However, the commonality of it leads to a widespread desensitization. James Agee’s A Death in the Family humanizes death and its intense effect on the lives of those left behind through the characterization of a family after tragedy has struck. A coping with life after a death leads some to religion and some a rejection thereof. The death of a parents leads to immense vulnerability. All of which, manifest in a great emotional despair. Yet, all can be exemplified in Agee’s words of widowed character Mary, “All that she had thought she experienced and knew - true though it all was - was nothing to this” (Agee 287).
Agee reveals human truths to convey a coping with death through characters’ relationships with religion. The widowed Mary has just lost her husband in a car accident that killed him with a one in a …show more content…
This section takes on a sophisticated and poetic diction that is far beyond insight that a child in a crib would be capable of expressing. However, this vivid passage represents the significance of a child’s parent. As Rufus’s thoughts are articulated, “I hear my father; I need never fear… When I am hungry it is they who provide for me…When I am in dismay… When I am, astonished or bewildered… When I am sick…” (82). Rufus goes on to describe the role of his parents and the comfort they provide. When Rufus begins to cry from fear of the dark, to comfort the frightened child from the darkness of the world outside of his crib, Jay comes into the room and reassures and protects him. James Agee included this italicized excerpt characterizing a toddler with the language of a poet to convey a contrast between the importance and prominence of a parent in a child’s life and how confusing and scary it may be with the sudden death of
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