Apple Trees

I am trying to think through the passage, beginning on the bottom of page 15 in our Harcourt edition, where Neville first mentions the apple trees and his association of them with death. The opening narration quickly shifts from him discussing being left being to him trying to recover a feeling, by standing in the same place where he felt it before, which he felt upon hearing the cook tell of a man found dead: "He was found with his throat cut. The apple-tree leaves became fixed in the sky; the moon glared; I was unable to lift my foot up the stair." Do the leaves become fixed for Neville, or for his mental projection of the leaves seen by the man with his throat slit. I believe the former, partly because the punctuation (the semi-colons indicate more association than the period, and the dead man is separated by period), and because the image of apple trees becomes so vivid for Neville that it seems he must have seen them, not imagined a dead man seeing them. He continues, "I shall call this stricture, this rigidity, 'death among the apple trees' for ever." He goes on to talk about these trees as "immitigable", "implacable", and that which "we cannot pass." Trees, as durable plants with lifespans comparable to humans, are frequently a symbol of life; the apple associated by this point with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge from which Eve ate, so thereby with sin and (potential for) death. Still, those are rather generic, and it seems almost as if, by our reading of "the apple-tree leaves become fixed", in Neville's perception at the moment of this confrontation with the awareness of death, the sensory image and memory of it -- in particular -- is what is important. And it is, to reiterate, a fixed image, eternal. This lack of motion in the trees become comparable to the new stillness of the dead man, "this stricture, this rigidity."  I still find it hard to put my finger on what is so compelling about this, except the image of the low boughs over soft grass, majestic and unswaying, beyond which is some "doom."