Peabody imagines death to be “merely a function of the mind – and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement” (43-44). He goes on to think, “The nihilists say it’s the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town” (44). Certainly, the beginning of this novel is focused very much on the logistics of death, on the movement required to lay something to rest. In the process of Addie Bundren’s death, some things linger – Peabody thinks that the problem with where they live is that the weather “hangs on too long” (45), it seems like every character is continually surprised each time a conversation does not reveal that Addie has died – and some things are on the move, antsy – Addie herself refuses to stay put even in death, men in general with their legs that aren’t roots.

The rest of the Bundren family, too, is on the move, all capitalizing on the momentum of death to propel them towards things they want. If death is a function of the minds of those left behind, action is a function of death for the Bundren family. They are fundamentalists in that way, looking for new beginnings in this schism. Dewey Dell might be somewhere in the middle, looking for a nihilistic ending that will restore a kind of stasis, making this restoration a new beginning that she is hoping nobody will understand.

Peabody’s own thoughts on death situate him firmly in the fundamentalist camp. He frames death as the beginning of a certain conception in the minds of those continuing to live. Death precipitates the beginning of a way of thinking. It precipitates the start of thinking that something has ended, which flies in the face of the perhaps more traditional conception of death as the end of thoughts, the end of a particular person and, amongst other things, the end of their mind and the way that they think. Seeing death as a fundamentalist makes death this compounding thing. Somebody being dead means that somebody is thinking of them as dead, and when that person dies, they will be thought of as dead in the mind of yet another living person. A fundamentalist death is a living one, one that makes choice, one that moves people. The Bundrens, Addie included, see death as the beginning of a new kind of movement.