l shows his appreciation for her hard work in keeping the family together: "Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then . . . pulled the covers up and shut her eyes." Anse shows her harshness and lack of maternal compassion. He tells his mother that there is bad luck where they live. She says, "Get up and move, then." To Addie, moving is meaningless, because life itself is bad luck, wherever one lives. Dewey Dell's reaction when Addie dies shows not the children's love for her but their dependence on her: "She flings herself across Addie Bundren's knees, clutching her, shaking her with the furious strength of the young before sprawling suddenly across the handful of rotten bones that Addie Bundren left."
The reader cannot possibly love Addie as portrayed by herself and her children, but perhaps one can lessen judgment of her unlovingness toward her family, herself and life by considering that she was shaped by her cruel, cold father, and that she fulfilled the duties of life and motherhood as she believed them to be. She was not loved as a child, and as a mother she could not love. She at least kept her family together until she died, at which point it quickly fell apart.
Ernest Hemingway, in his short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," shows Harry to be a typical Hemingway code her, for better or worse. Harry shows no evolution as a character as he prepares to di
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