ance of life's harsh reality and death's inevitability. However, she, like the bulk of her family, has no meaningful or restorative concept of spirituality or of a consciousness beyond one's own pitiful confusion. These factors force the reader to make decisions and judgments not only with respect to the truthfulness of the conflicting accounts, but even more importantly to the emotional realities this family and its mother/center express. Does the reader judge Addie for helping to fashion a miserable and bewildered family, or does the reader finally yield to a sense of compassion, or at least pity, for this lost family?
Addie's take on life and death might be considered realistic, but when we compare her consciousness to that of the crumbling Darl, we see the barren nature of the mother. Her "realism" is nothing more than a perhaps inevitable outcome of the forces which created her---her miserable, life-hating father, her weak
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