"Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes"

"Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passes. "What are you laughing at?" I said.
     "Yes yes yes yes yes."
     Two men put him on the train. They wore mismatched coats, bulging behind over their right hip pockets. Their necks were shaved to a hairline, as though the recent and simultaneous barbers had had a chalk-line like Cash's. "Is it the pistols you're laughing at?" I said. "Why do you laugh?" I said. "Is it because you hate the sound of laughing?"
... Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his trimmed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.
     "Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes" (253).

     Darl's final section just does it for me. The voice we relied on for reason and the slightest of normalcy is now lost somewhere in the ashes of that burned barn. It seems somewhat ironic that the act meant to be the one which would snap the family out of the madness backfires and instead puts Darl into this crazed state of mind. I can't stop but wonder if he was actually crazy all along. Even in the earlier part of the novel he claims to be hearing the thoughts of those around him, and we also know that he "witnesses" occurrences that he is not actually present for. "As you enter the hall, they sound as though they were speaking out of the air about your head" (20). By the end of the novel, it seems that Darl loses this aspect of himself and succumbs to the madness all around him. He can no longer see through the perspectives of his siblings and assumes what they are saying in his broken mind. "Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl..." He becomes one with all of which surrounds him and falls victim to his family's final judgment; and they hardly care at all. The question he keeps asking himself is also quite intriguing; why exactly is  he laughing? Could it be that when one reaches a point of unbelievability and ridiculousness towards a situation, one can't help but just laugh at it? I've seen this pattern all too much in several other places and as far as I know, this is how the hero (or neutral) becomes the villain. This maniacal laughter is a turning point in the novel and convinces us that the most "normal" person all along has been none other than Cash.

Questions to Discuss: Why is Darl laughing? And how, as the reader, are we supposed to feel about Darl's being sent to the mental institution? Do we feel bad for him or do we just shrug it off while we eat our bananas from a paper bag?