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- "Light in August"SummaryLena Grove, whose parents are dead, goes to live with her brother. While there, she gets pregnant by a man named Lucas Burch, who runs out on her but not before saying that he'll send for Lena once he finds a town in which they can settle down. Hearing no word from Lucas for a long time, the pregnant Lena walks from Alabama into Mississippi looking for him. Along the way she hears that Lucas might be in Jefferson, so she walks toward that town. On the day she arrives in Jefferson, an old plantation house owned by Joanna Burden is on fire. We later learn that Joe Christmas, who lived in an old slave cabin on the plantation and was having a sexual relationship with Joanna, is accused of the murder. The Jefferson townspeople seem more angry that Joe is part black and has killed a white woman than they are about it being Joanna who was murdered.
Flashback three years earlier to the Jefferson planing mill where a man named Byron Bunch works; Byron will become one of the main characters — and a primary narrator — in the novel. A man named Joe Christmas shows up looking for work and is hired, followed soon thereafter by a man named Joe Brown being hired. Christmas and Brown work together and form a relationship about which the other workers are unsure. Brown lets it be known that Christmas used to run a whiskey distillery; it's unclear if Christmas still runs it. But the talk is that Christmas still does, and that Brown delivers the whiskey to whomever will buy it. Christmas quits the planing mill; Brown quits soon thereafter. We learn that Christmas — and perhaps Brown as well — supposedly lives in an old slave quarter on the grounds of an old plantation owned by Miss Joanna Burden. Burden's family had moved to Jefferson from the north during Reconstruction; Burden purportedly remains a Yankee — which in Jefferson means befriending blacks.
Byron Bunch is working alone at the planing mill when Lena Grove shows up looking for Lucas Burch. Byron and Lena strike up a conversation, during which Byron lets slip that Joe Brown is an alias of Lucas Burch's. Byron is disappointed because he has started to have affections for Lena.
The story recounts how Reverend Gail Hightower and his wife came to Jefferson long ago when Hightower was hired by a Jefferson Presbyterian church to be its minister. Oftentimes Hightower's wife leaves Jefferson supposedly to visit her family, but one day a woman from Jefferson who is in Memphis shopping sees Mrs. Hightower, and Jefferson soon begins gossiping about why Mrs. Hightower regularly visits Memphis. Eventually she is institutionalized, and once released returns to be with her husband in Jefferson. However, she soon again regularly visits Memphis and eventually dies after falling through a hotel window; she was in the hotel with a man with whom she had registered as husband and wife. The sensationalism of Reverend Hightower's wife having been in a Memphis hotel with another man turns Jefferson against Hightower, and eventually he is forced to resign his position from the church. The town tries to force him to leave Jefferson altogether, but he refuses. The furor eventually dies down, but Hightower is forever regarded as damned by the people of Jefferson.
Byron Bunch visits Hightower and narrates how the Burden house has burned down. Miss Burden is dead from her neck being cut, and it appears that the fire was set to cover up the murder. Brown is questioned by the sheriff and claims that Christmas and Miss Burden have been sleeping with one another; even more shocking to the sheriff is Brown's assertion that Christmas is part black. It's unclear how truthful Brown is in relating the details concerning Christmas, Miss Burden, and the fire.
The story then flashes back even farther when Joe Christmas was five years old and living in an orphanage, and he inadvertently caught the dietician and another orphanage employee having sex. Joe thinks he's in trouble because he was eating a mouthful of toothpaste in the dietician's room; the dietician thinks that Joe will tell that he saw her and the man together. The dietician contrives to get Joe sent to an orphanage for black children rather than remaining at the white children's orphanage. Eventually, a man named McEachern adopts Joe and takes him home; McEachern is unaware that Joe is part black.
Time passes, and Joe eventually grows into a teenager. At seventeen, he begins sneaking out of the McEachern house and meeting a waitress named Bobbie from town. Their relationship is sexual. Joe is more serious — and naïve — about their relationship than Bobbie is. McEachern begins to suspect that Joe is sneaking out of the house and one night sees Joe go into the stable, where Joe keeps a suit to wear when meeting Bobbie. A car picks up Joe, and McEachern follows on his horse. McEachern discovers Joe and Bobbie at a dance and begins yelling at Bobbie. Joe strikes McEachern with a chair. Bobbie runs from the dance, and Joe runs home to get the secret money that Mrs. McEachern has been hiding from her husband but not from Joe. Joe goes to where Bobbie lives, intending that he and Bobbie will run away together and get married. But the couple with whom Bobbie lives over the restaurant and a nameless man are preparing to leave town with Bobbie; all of them fear that Joe has killed McEachern and that the police will soon show up on their doorstep. Joe doesn't truly understand what's happening. The stranger repeatedly strikes Joe until Joe is close to losing consciousness.
Following his losing Bobbie, Joe runs away. For fifteen years he wanders, traveling between Chicago, Detroit, and Mexico, and finally heading into Mississippi. He happens upon the Burden house and breaks in to steal food. Joe is discovered by Miss Burden, who doesn't seem upset that Joe has broken into her kitchen. In fact, Miss Burden allows Joe to stay in an old slave cabin on her property. One night he enters the Burden house unannounced, goes to her bedroom, and has sex with her. But then, troubled with himself, Joe avoids her until one day he finds her in his cabin, where she tells Joe the story of herself and her ancestors.
Joe and Joanna's relationship goes through various phases. At one point, Joanna says that she's pregnant — although she is not. Toward the end of their relationship, Joanna tries to get Joe to go to a school for blacks and then become a lawyer, but Joe will not do these things, in part because that would mean he would first have to acknowledge that he is part black. The last phase of their relationship involves Joanna trying to get Joe to pray with her, but Joe refuses. Joanna suggests that perhaps both she and Joe should kill themselves, and not too long thereafter Joe kills Joanna.
The sheriff hunts for Joe but is unable to track him down. Byron Bunch speaks to Hightower and reveals that he has taken Lena to live in the cabin that Lucas Burch and Joe Christmas lived in on the Burden plantation. Joe, continually avoiding capture by the Jefferson sheriff, eventually hitches a ride going to Mottstown, which is not too far from Jefferson.
Joe is caught in Mottstown without putting up a struggle. During Joe's capture, Uncle Doc Hines is downtown and hears Joe's name being said by the townspeople. He runs up to the crowd holding Joe and begins yelling that Joe should be killed immediately. Later, Mrs. Hines asks her husband what he did with Milly's baby — meaning Joe Christmas; eventually we learn that Joe Christmas is the Hines' grandson, born to their daughter, Milly. The sheriff from Jefferson arrives in Mottstown and takes custody of Joe. Uncle Doc and Mrs. Hines buy two train tickets for Jefferson.
Back in Jefferson, Byron brings Doc and Mrs. Hines to Hightower's house, where Doc and Mrs. Hines individually recount Joe's history: The Hines' daughter, Milly, had sex with a black man from a traveling circus and got pregnant. Hines killed the man, and Milly eventually died giving birth to Joe. Hines took Joe without Mrs. Hines' knowledge and deposited him on an orphanage's doorstep. During the next five years, Hines watched Joe grow; Mrs. Hines had no idea if Joe was even alive. Once the Hines have finished relating Joe's history, Byron asks Hightower if Hightower will lie and say that Joe was with him when Joanna Burden was killed, thereby providing Joe an alibi. Hightower adamantly refuses.
Byron gets Hightower to come to the cabin in which Lena is staying because Lena is about to give birth. Doc and Mrs. Hines are there as well. Hightower helps Lena gives birth to a boy, and then returns home. Later, he again returns to the cabin and finds Lena and her son alone. Lena explains that Byron asked her to marry him and that she said no. Hightower learns that Byron has quit his job at the planing mill and is downtown at the courthouse.
Bryon talks the sheriff into taking Lucas Burch out to the cabin to show Lena and the baby to him. Lucas is surprised to see Lena, as well as the baby. He begins his usual deceitful banter about his wanting to take care of Lena and their child, but he's waiting on money and has enemies who don't want him to get it. He again walks out on Lena, slipping through a back window of the cabin so that the deputy sheriff waiting at the front won't see him. Byron spies Lucas leaving the cabin and follows him, eventually catching up to Lucas by the train tracks that run outside of Jefferson. Byron fights Lucas and is beaten — as he guessed he would be. Byron watches as Lucas jumps onto a train and disappears. While Byron is walking back to the cabin, a man in a passing wagon tells Byron that Joe has been killed.
We learn that as the deputy sheriff was leading Joe through the town square, Joe escaped. A young man named Percy Grimm, who had organized men to guard the courthouse, jail, and square, followed Joe and eventually saw Joe run into Hightower's house. Earlier, Joe's grandmother, Mrs. Hines, had visited Joe in jail and told Joe about Hightower. Over Hightower's assertion that Joe was with him the night Joanna Burden was murdered, Grimm repeatedly shoots Joe, and then castrates him with a butcher knife. Joe dies.
At the end of the novel, Lena is again on the road, only this time she has Byron Bunch and her baby with her. Bunch wants to marry Lena, but Lena seems consumed with finding Lucas Burch — plus she likes traveling.
Analysis of CharactersJoe ChristmasLight in August’s main protagonist, Joe Christmas, also stands as one of the novel’s most enigmatic characters. An angry man, he is a shadow figure who walks the fringes, treading neither lightly nor comfortably in both the black and white worlds. When Joe first appears, he provokes a healthy amount of curiosity on the part of the mill workers, accompanied by contempt for his smug aloofness and other disarming qualities. Though Faulkner provides many details of Joe’s life and character over the course of his tale, Christmas still remains a distant, inscrutable figure, closed and elusive. At the mill he is a cipher, a blank slate onto which others project their own biased and subjective notions of who they think the mysterious man truly is. Many believe that he hails from an unknown foreign country.
Several loose correlations connect Joe Christmas’s life to that of Jesus. The two figures share the same initials, Joe was left on the orphanage steps on Christmas, and Joe is in his early thirties when he is killed in the standoff in Hightower’s kitchen. But these suggestions of similarity are loose and gestural, allowing Faulkner to complicate and darken the moral nature of his protagonist. Faulkner’s characterization of Joe Christmas challenges and ultimately subverts any Christlike comparisons. Any attempt to see Joe Christmas as a martyr is complicated by his life of violence and his general contempt for humanity. He emerges as a classically flawed and conflicted modern antihero. A brooding loner, he is a man without an identity. Unaware of his birth name, much less his racial heritage, he wanders in a futile search for a place where he can belong. Whereas Jesus’ life inspired emulation and praise, Joe Christmas generates little sympathy from those around him. The grim conditions that surrounded his upbringing do little to explain or dismiss his compulsive need to inflict harm on others—and, in two cases, to go so far as to take a life. Christmas’s attempt to reclaim and establish his identity in the world is marred by a disdain for the very people who could possibly provide him with the comfort he seeks.
Lena GroveSuperficially, in light of the muted references to biblical imagery that Faulkner includes in the novel, Lena suggests Mary journeying to Bethlehem—but Mary as a lost, wide-eyed teenager. Instead of a stable, she gives birth to her son in a rustic cabin, eventually moving on with her surrogate Joseph, Byron Bunch, in tow. But that is where the comparison ends: more than anything, Lena can be seen as a simple embodiment of the novel’s life force. Whereas Joe Christmas brings violence and death to Jefferson, Lena brings her developing child and a flinty determination to find the baby’s father. She replaces Christmas and supplants his presence in the novel, giving birth to her son on a cot in the simple shelter that once housed the twin criminal Joes.
Whereas Joe Christmas is the classic tragic Faulkner figure, doomed to struggle and fail, Lena represents another Faulkner type, often reserved for select female characters in his fictional worlds. She is the wanderer, the young innocent, believable in her determination to make her baby legitimate. Lena is a survivor, yet she does not struggle against the challenges and the deprivation that she faces. At the same time, she does not allow her poverty, naïveté, and lack of education to conspire against her. She accepts suffering with little resistance, facing it head-on, withstanding it, and then continuing on her way. Her wanderings frame the narrative: at the beginning, she enters Jefferson alone. Then in her brief, symbolic stopover, the birth of her son offers a brief glimmer of hope to a town marked by murder and racial discord. Lena then takes to the road again, accompanied by her infant and older protector and admirer, embracing the freedom that once characterized Joe Christmas’s years of wandering.
Reverend Gail HightowerMuch of Reverend Hightower’s characterization centers around his quirky if not obsessive fixation on his grandfather’s Confederate cavalry unit. Though the dust and thundering charge of the unit have long dispelled, the hoofbeats and clamor still echo in Hightower’s memory. They serve as a powerful reminder of humans’ uneasy relationship with the past—its burden and ubiquitous presence. Through the figure of Hightower, the past becomes a living entity that is never escaped or left behind. Nor are its hard-won lessons always heeded, as violence and racial divide grip Jefferson and its environs almost as profoundly as in the days of the Civil War. Hightower’s life stands as a grim reminder of the fact that, for many, there is no fresh start, no hope for a new direction or change. His wife’s erratic behavior and subsequent suicide trigger a process of gradual decline, as Hightower bears the guilt and stigma of the scandal. He punishes himself—and the community at large at the same time—by refusing to admit total defeat in leaving town after he has been stripped of his duties.
In light of personal setback and unexpected disappointment, Hightower’s life stands as a testament to the recovery and reassertion of dignity and personal pride. Pride takes on a double meaning in Hightower’s tangled stream-of-consciousness musings. He attempts to reclaim the pride of self, his self-respect and self-esteem, while resisting vanity, a proud resistance against the vicious gossip and rumors that course through the community. In his musings and ruminations, Hightower stands as the moral or philosophical center of the novel. In the midst of the tragedy and ill circumstances that have marked his life, he is able to salvage greater strength, self-awareness, and wisdom. Along the way, he is also able to confront and lay to rest the family ghosts and the legacy of the painful past that haunts him still.
Byron BunchInert, worn dull by years of routine and six-day work weeks, Byron Bunch lives in a detached and insulated world designed around the avoidance of entanglement—personal, emotional, or otherwise. When Lena arrives at the mill in Jefferson, her plight triggers an instinct in Byron to reach out and to engage, finally, the life of another. There is no doubt that Byron is a good man: he lives an honest, upstanding life and directs the choir at a rural church each Sunday, returning for the start of his shift the following morning. But it is a sanitized, hollow goodness, achieved through inaction and a regimented life free of any temptation or challenge. He has lived a moral life by avoiding rather than engaging the world around him. His growing attachment to Lena parallels a gradual awakening in Byron as he attempts to turn from the man he once was—the man who has protected himself too stringently from experiencing pain, sorrow, or conflict.
Bunch’s friendship with Hightower not only providers a much-needed source of inspiration and challenge to Byron but also adds a new layer of moral and philosophical complexity to his life. Byron turns to his friend for counsel and wisdom and in turn is able to reveal his own desires and intentions through his dialogues with the defrocked minister. Hightower casts doubt on the purity of Byron’s sentiments in reaching out to selflessly help Lena and questions his supposed disinterest or lack of ulterior motive in improving her situation. Byron is forced to resolve his feelings for Lena—confronting both public opinion and his own selfishness—to conclude, in the end, that he is an honorable man who has chosen to live a more fully engaged and fully present life. Byron’s willingness to fight Joe Brown, to be beaten by the larger man, is the visceral reawakening that he needs. It reveals finally his resolve to be involved in the life of another and his willingness to risk personal injury. Byron is determined to stand by Lena and deal with the conflicting emotions and vulnerabilities that he experiences in loving another. In the end, Byron may still have much to learn when it comes to courting and caring for Lena, but he has at last found a freedom and a purpose to his life hitherto avoided or ignored.
Essay: The Individual and the Community in Light of August (*Reprinted from Studies in American Literature, ed. Waldo McNeir and Leo B. Levy, Humanities Series, No. 8 (Baton Rouge; Louisiana State University Press, 1960), pp. 132-53, 170-72, by permission of Louisiana State University Press.)
Light in August is probably Faulkner's most complex and difficult novel. Here he combined numerous themes on a large canvas where many aspects of life are vividly portrayed. The publication of this novel marked the end of Faulkner's greatest creative period — in four years he had published five substantial novels and numerous short stories. Light in August is the culmination of this creative period and is the novel in which Faulkner combines many of his previous themes with newer insights into human nature. In Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner had examined the relationship of the individual to his family. In his next major novel, Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner returned to the family as the point of departure for his story. In Light in August, the family as a unit is replaced by the community, which although not examined as the family is in other novels, serves as the point of departure.
The novel may be interpreted on many levels. It suggests such themes as man's isolation in the modern world, man's responsibility to the community, the sacrifice of Christ, the search-for-a-father, man's inhumanity to man, and the theme of denial and flight as opposed to passive acceptance and resignation.
Each of these can be adequately supported, but none seems to present the whole intent of the novel. Perhaps this is because the complexity of the novel yields to no single interpretation but seems to require a multiple approach.
The complex theme of man's need to live within himself while he recognizes his responsibility both to himself and to his fellow man will support such a multiple approach to Light in August. The reaction of the various characters to the community offers another basic approach to the novel. Phyllis Hirshleifer emphasizes the isolation of man in the novel, while Cleanth Brooks sees in it man's relationship in the community. These two views do not exclude each other. The isolation of each character only reinforces his struggle for status both with the community and with himself.
Light in August follows in the logical pattern set by Faulkner's two earlier novels, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. The preceding novels dealt with man trying to find a meaningful relationship with the immediate family, and this one deals with man in relationship to the community and as an isolated being unable to communicate with his fellow man.
Cleanth Brooks writes that the community serves as "the field for man's actions and the norm by which his action is judged and regulated." But the difficulty here is that we do not have a sufficient picture of the norm. It would be accurate to regard the community as a force which man tries to assail or avoid. And as Miss Hirshleifer writes: "The society through which Lena moves, the people who give her food, lodging, money and transportation because of her patient understanding modesty are, after all, the same people who crucify the Christmases whose evil arouses their own." It is, therefore, the responses of the community to the individual that become significant. While Lena evokes responses for good, Joe Christmas seems to arouse their evil instincts, and Hightower arouses their suspicion.
But these responses are not seen, as Brooks suggests, from the view of the community, but through the effects they produce on the individual character. Thus the community reacts in varying ways, but none of these reactions could accurately be considered as the norm of behavior. And even though Lena is able to evoke responses for good from various people, she remains outside the community. Each character in the novel is seen as a lonely individual pitted against some force either within or outside himself. Lena, Byron Bunch, Hightower, Christmas, Joanna Burden, Joe Brown, Uncle Doc Hines, and even people like Percy Grimm and McEachern stand outside the community. This is further emphasized by the fact that both Lena and Christmas are orphans who have no family whom they can return to. The community is also used as the objective commentator on the action. We get the long-range view usually from the point-of-view of the community, but nowhere during any of the long views does the community make any definite moral evaluations.
The isolation theme is carried over into the structure of the novel. The novel may be broken down into many groups of seemingly isolated vignettes. Each scene, however, is part of one large thematic mosaic, and none could be successfully removed without destroying the whole. Likewise, each isolated character in each isolated scene is viewed in the final analysis as a part of the structure of a unified whole. Thus the isolation of each character is supported by the structural device of presenting the action of the novel in groups of vignettes.
Lena wills her own isolation. Although she could have left her brother's home unmolested and by the front door, she chose to leave by the window which had played such a prominent part in her pregnancy. She never complains of her lot and never asks for help from anyone. However, she instinctively knows that people will help her; so she comes to accept their help at face value. Her simple faith in life is echoed by her belief that she ought to be with the father of her child when it is born: "I reckon the Lord will see to that." Her responses to life are the simple and basic reactions founded on a simple philosophy of charity and hope. She is always anxious to help those people who give her assistance, and she would always "be obliged" if others would share her meager meals with her. She constantly feels the need to commune and share her experience with others.
Even though she relies upon the kindness of strangers, her strength lies in the fact that she has assumed complete responsibility for her acts. She blames no person for her predicament, and she acknowledges no outside hostile force working against her. Lena, then, brings with her the potential salvation and redemption of Byron Bunch and Hightower by evoking from them responses for good and forcing them to become involved in responsibility.
Byron Bunch, during his seven years in Jefferson before Lena's arrival, had only one acquaintance, the Reverend Gail Hightower, who was an outcast completely isolated from the community. The community had never noticed Byron, except in a casual way to comment upon his idiosyncrasies, until he became involved with Lena. Merely by her passivity and her simple questions, Lena forces Byron to become involved. After revealing to her the identity of Joe Brown, Byron then feels responsible to her. This feeling of responsibility draws Bryon out of his lethargic existence and forces him into the stream of life. He in turn tries to involve Hightower, who struggles against Byron's interference. Hightower has lived too long in his isolated world of self-abnegation and denial to see that Byron must feel responsible for Lena. He cannot understand Byron's actions and interprets them as possessing some ulterior motive.
But Byron's actions are the outcome of more than thirty years of routine monotony and celibacy. Byron, like Lena, had willed his own isolation in Jefferson; however, with the appearance of Lena, he is forced to become involved in society. His potential redemption is that he is able to live outside himself and commune with another person; and even though this involvement was forced upon him, his strength and salvation lie in the fact that he willingly accepts the responsibility for his actions. Not only does he commit the necessary acts of preparing for Lena's child and acting as her protector, but also, he exceeds the demands made upon him when he follows after the fleeing Brown and confronts him even though he knows that he will be beaten. Thus Byron, after willing his own isolation, has involvement forced upon him which he willingly accepts.
Hightower's isolation is likewise somewhat self-imposed. Initially, the isolation derived from forces over which he had no control. His grandfather's ghost haunted his Calvinistic conscience until it forced him to marry a girl whom he did not love and subject her to his own ghosts. He is haunted by two conflicting views of his grandfather — that of the romantic cavalry officer galloping down the streets with drawn saber and that of the grandfather shot while stealing chickens, and furthermore, shot probably by some woman.
The seminary he attended acted not as a sanctuary from his phantoms, as he hoped it would, but rather as a means of furthering his ends and preparing him for a call to Jefferson. At the seminary, he met his future wife, who wanted to escape from the tedium of her life there. At Jefferson, he confused God with his grandfather, galloping horses with salvation, and the cavalry with Calvary. His sermons then reflected his own confusion and, as he later realizes, did not bring to the congregation the messages of hope and forgiveness.
When his wife commits suicide as a result of Hightower failure as a husband, the congregation then turns against High-tower. He then becomes the rejected and isolated minister. Therefore, part of his isolation is forced upon him, but in part it derives from his own inner failure to bring the past and present into a workable unity.
Carl Benson writes: "Hightower shapes his own destiny by acts of will, and he is, therefore, morally accountable for his choice." It seems, however, that Hightower's earlier life was shaped for him from forces of the past over which he had no control. These are the forces which ultimately cause him to be rejected by the Presbyterian congregation. It is only after his dismissal that Hightower wills his own destiny, and therefore becomes morally liable for it. His choice to stay in Jefferson despite persecution, disgrace, and physical violence results in his complete isolation. His moral responsibility derives from the sanctity of isolation away from the community. He thinks that because he suffered the disgrace and shame, the physical torment and pain, he has won the right to peace and solitude and the privilege of remaining uninvolved in life. He refuses to accept responsibility for his past faults because his suffering has atoned for his previous errors.
But with the entrance of Lena into Jefferson, Hightower is forcefully drawn into the stream of life again and realizes that the past has not been bought and paid for. Hightower, therefore, cannot become the effective moral reflector of the novel until he is able to come to terms both with himself and his fellow man, and until he assumes a place in society again and recognizes his responsibility to himself and his fellow man.
Lena, Byron, and Hightower all will their isolation. Joe Christmas' isolation is forced upon him early in his life by outside forces and attitudes. Part of his plight in life comes from the fact that he can never accept anything but partial responsibility for his acts and at the same time attempts to disclaim all responsibility for them. Just before killing Joanna, he thinks that "Something is going to happen to me," which suggests that Christmas looks upon his violent actions as being compelled by exterior forces which relieve him of any personal responsibility. But then this only increases his predicament, because he does feel a partial responsibility for his actions. If, then, Christmas' life and attitudes are shaped by exterior forces, it is necessary, in order to understand his plight, to determine how much Christmas feels he should be held responsible for his acts.
Joe's earliest attitudes were formulated in the orphanage. It was here that he first discovered that he possessed Negro blood — a fact that in one way or another controlled or affected his every act throughout life. His remaining life was spent trying to bring these two irreconcilable opposites into a significant relationship. His unknown father bequeathed him his Negro blood, and this heritage, over which he had no control, is the strongest influence upon his life. At the orphanage he is first called "nigger." The blood cages him in, and the vigilance of Euphues Hines sets him apart from the rest of the orphans. He is unable to establish a meaningful relationship with any of the other children, and he senses his difference.
One experience at the orphanage, especially, has multiple consequences for Christmas. When he is discovered stealing the dietitian's toothpaste, he expects punishment and instead is bribed with more money than he knew existed. This experience becomes the determining factor in his attitude toward the order of existence, women, and sex throughout the rest of his life. Since he was kept in suspense for several days desiring punishment which never came, he was left confused as to the meaning of his act.
Therefore, during the rest of his life when the pattern or order of existence is broken, the result is usually disastrous. When he transgresses McEachern's rules he expects and receives punishment, which accords with his idea of the order of things. This is again why he detests the interference of Mrs. McEachern. She, like the dietitian, represents a threat to the settled order of human existence. Or else, with each prostitute during his years on the road, he would tell her that he was a Negro, which always brought one reaction. When this pattern is broken by the prostitute who did not care whether he was Negro or not, his reactions are violent and he beats her unmercifully.
Thus his violent outburst comes from the unconscious desire to punish the dietitian who had first violated his pattern of order. The same reaction is seen in his relationship with Joanna Burden. For about two years, their relationship conformed to an ordered (though unorthodox) pattern; but when Joanna broke this pattern with her demands that Christmas take over her finances, go to a Negro school, and finally that he pray with her in order to be saved, he again reacted violently to this violation of his concept of an ordered existence.
His basic hatred for women ultimately returns to this episode. The dietitian in violating his order of existence also attempted to destroy his individuality. Thus the effeminizing efforts of Mrs. McEachern to soften his relations with his foster father are rejected because if he yielded to them, he would face the possibility of losing the firm and ordered relation with McEachern. As long as he maintains this masculine relationship with McEachern, he feels that he retains his individuality.
And, finally, the childhood episode with the dietitian is reflected in his sex life. The toothpaste becomes the basic symbol. At the same time that it is a cleansing agent, it also serves as a phallic symbol. The result of the scene is his utter sickness caused by the "pink woman smelling obscurity behind the curtain" and the "listening . . . with astonished fatalism for what was about to happen to him." Each subsequent sex relation, therefore, brings a guilt feeling to Christmas. He associated sex with filth, sickness, violation of order, and the potential loss of individuality.
Likewise, it is significant that each of his subsequent encounters with sex is accompanied by strong sensory images. When he beats the young Negro girl, it is amid the strong odors of the barn and he is also reminded of the sickness caused by the toothpaste. Later, his first encounter with Bobbie Allen is in the restaurant where he goes to order food, and finally, he meets Joanna in her kitchen when he is stealing food from her. Each of these sensory occurrences recalls to him the scene with the dietitian and again threatens the loss of individuality and the breaking of an ordered existence.
Christmas' need for order is violated in turn by each of the women with whom he comes into contact. The lesson he learned early in life was that he could depend upon men, but women were forever unpredictable. It was the woman who always broke the pattern of order. First the dietitian, then Mrs. McEachern violated his concept of order, and then Bobbie Allen turned violently against him at the time when he most needed her. The last woman to break his order of existence was Joanna Burden, who paid for it with her life.
The women, then, serve as the destroyers of order. This is brought out mechanically by Faulkner by using the biblical concept of woman as being unclean. Their menstrual period breaks the order of their life and then comes to represent their unordered and unclean life. The first time he learned of their monthly occurrences, Christmas' reactions were violent and ended in a blood baptism — the blood being taken from a young sheep that he killed. But even then he rejected this knowledge so that when Bobbie Allen tried to explain the same thing to him, again his reactions were violent, this time ending with his vomiting. When he next sees Bobbie, he takes her with force and animal brutality. Again, he seems to be reacting against his initial introduction to sex through the dietitian, again asserting his masculinity by forcing order upon the woman.
Christmas' great need for order reverts basically to the two bloods in him which are in constant conflict. As stated previously, his blood is his own battleground. He can neither accept nor reject his mixture of blood, and neither can he bring these two elements into a workable solution. Christmas' plight results from his inability to secure a suitable position in society and he searches for a society that will accept both elements of his blood. Unable to find this, he isolates himself from all human society.
Christmas' youthful love for Bobbie Allen existed on an idealistic plane because he was able to confess his Negro blood to her and be accepted by her as an individual. However, her betrayal of his love accompanied by her taunts of "nigger bastard" and "clod-hopper" implants the idea in his mind that due to his blood he must remain the isolated being.
His search for peace, then, is a search for someone who could accept Joe Christmas as an individual despite his conflicting blood. When Joanna Burden asks Christmas how he knows he has Negro blood, he tells her that if he has no Negro blood, then he has "wasted a lot of time." He has spent his whole life and energy trying to reconcile these two bloods, and if he has no Negro blood then all the efforts of his life have been to no avail."
Joanna Burden should have been the person who could have accepted Joe for what he was. By the time of their involvement, Christmas no longer seems to revolt against being called a Negro. But Joanna fails him. In being corrupted by him, she seems to enjoy the corruption even more by screaming "Negro! Negro!" as he makes love to her. At thirty-three, Joe has learned to accept this name-calling without the accompanying violent reactions; he is living in partial peace with himself, even though this peace has been found only in complete isolation.
He must reject all of mankind in order to find peace. This is seen when Byron offers Christmas food and the offer is rejected. Therefore, when Joanna offers him jobs, wants him to go to school, or tries to get him to pray, he feels that she is trying to destroy his isolation and peace. He is then forced to kill her or allow his own individuality, order, and peace to be destroyed by her. Faulkner conveys this on the story level simply by the fact that Joanna planned to kill Christmas and would have succeeded if the pistol had not failed her. Christmas is then forced to kill her in self-protection.
His life, his individuality, his peace, and his order would have been destroyed by Joanna had he yielded to her. And her death is accompanied by Christmas' refrain: "all I wanted was peace." But even at Joanna Burden's house, Joe could not attain his desired peace with himself because the warring elements of his blood compelled him to tell others that he was a Negro. At least, he confessed to Joanna and Brown. If, then, he could achieve peace only by isolating himself from people and by rejecting all responsibility toward society, he could never attain inner peace until he could accept himself and his own blood, both Negro and white.
Since Joanna was an overpowering threat to Joe's sense of peace and order, he realized that he must murder her or be destroyed by her. But the murder was not one in cold blood. The elaborate and symbolic rituals preceding the actual performance suggest that Joe is involved in a deep struggle with himself. The murder, instead of resolving his minor conflicts, severs him forever from any hope of becoming a meaningful part of society.
It is significant that he does not attempt to escape. He never leaves the vicinity of the crime. On the Tuesday after the Friday of the crime, he enters the Negro church and curses God. This is the height of his conflict. The white blood can no longer remain pacified and must express itself in violence. It remains now for Joe to come to terms with the conflicting elements within himself, and this can be done only within the circle of his own self; consequently, there is no need for Joe to leave the immediate neighborhood of his crime.
When Joe exchanges his shoes for the Negro's brogans, he seems to accept his heritage for the first time in his life. And with his acceptance of his black blood, Joe Christmas finds peace for the first time in his life. Like Lena Grove, who always accepted her responsibility, Joe realizes now that in order to find peace, he must accept full responsibility for his heritage and actions. And again like Lena, when he accepts this responsibility, he finds peace and contentment, and he becomes unified with nature.
Following this recognition and acceptance, he undergoes once more a symbolic cleansing ritual. This time using the Negro's shoes to sharpen his razor, Christmas prepares himself for his return to town in order to assume responsibility for his actions.
It is when Joe accepts his Negro heritage and recognizes that he can never escape from himself that he breathes quietly for the first time in his life and is suddenly hungry no longer. This recognition that he is no longer hungry becomes significant against the background of Joe's earlier life, which was filled with a constant struggle against hunger. That is, when he accepts himself, he symbolically becomes at peace with his tormenting hunger and also he sleeps peacefully for the first time.
With his acceptance of his responsibility and his recognition of his heritage, Joe can once more approach others. This is revealed by the scenes which immediately precede and follow Joe's self-realization. In the first scene, Joe approaches a Negro in order to ask him the day of the week, and his mere appearance creates astonishment and terror in the Negro's mind. He flees from Christmas in utter horror. But immediately after Joe has come to peace with himself, he approaches another Negro who quite naturally and nonchalantly offers him a ride to Mottstown.
Joe now has achieved an acceptance for himself, and he thinks that he will sleep, but then realizes that he needs no sleep and no food because he has found peace within himself. Thus Joe has traveled farther in the last seven days than in all the years of his life, because for the first time he has come to a complete recognition of his own life and sees that the true value or meaning of life is within his circle where he is able to achieve an understanding with himself.
Joe's plight in life, however, is not resolved. He could gain a partial truce with society by isolating himself from society; or else, he could attain a full acceptance of himself, but note that this was achieved while outside the community in complete isolation. Once he has recognized his responsibility, he must then return to the community. And once again in the community, he comes to the realization that he can never be accepted by society. The realization of his complete rejection is made more terrible by the wild rantings of his own grandfather, who demands his death." Thus, if old Doc Hines must persecute his own grandson, Joe realizes that there can be peace for him only in death. His escape finally, however, seems to be not so much because of the fanaticism of old Doc Hines, but rather because of the quiet persuasion of Mrs. Hines. Her appearance at the jail was probably Joe's final proof of the woman's need to destroy his individuality.
Doc and Mrs. Hines then contribute to Joe's death, since they set peaceful elements into contention again. Consequently, his escape is an escape from woman and also a search for peace and order through death. It is, therefore, logical that after his escape he runs first to a Negro cabin and then to Hightower's house. Through Mrs. Hines, Hightower has become the symbol of hope and peace to Christmas, and in his search for peace through death, he chooses Hightower's house as his sanctuary in which he passively accepts his crucifixion. His failure to fire the pistol is symbolic of his acceptance of his crucifixion and death and of his recognition that he can find peace only in death.
The violent death and castration of Christmas at the hands of Percy Grimm implant in our memories the atrocities that man is capable of committing against his fellow man. Grimm becomes the extreme potential of all the community when society refuses to accept its responsibility to mankind. Or as Hightower uttered when he first heard about Christmas: "Poor man. Poor mankind." That is, Joe's death is not as much a tragedy for Joe as it is a tragedy for the society which would allow such a crime as
Grimm's to be perpetrated. In Grimm's act, therefore, we see the failure of man to attain recognition, sympathy, or communion among other men and society's failure to accept man in the abstract.
But Joe's death was not in vain. Through his death and through the birth of Lena's child, Hightower has attained salvation in life by arriving at a complete realization of his own responsibility. Earlier in life, Hightower thought that through suffering he had won for himself the privilege of remaining uninvolved in life. But with the appearance of Lena, he becomes once more drawn into the active stream of life. This participation was not voluntary but forced upon him in the first instance (delivering Lena's child), but after rejecting Mrs. Hines's pleas, his second act (attempting to save Joe's life) is entirely voluntary.
Originally the attraction of Hightower and Byron to each other depended upon both being isolated from the community; but as Byron becomes involved, he draws Hightower in also. Until after Lena gives birth, Hightower struggles to retain his isolation and advises Byron to do the same. But Byron's involvement is too deep. Hightower's struggle for isolation becomes more intense as he sees himself threatened with involvement, especially when he is asked by Byron and Mrs. Hines to lie for Joe Christmas' (and in Hightower's words, mankind's) benefit. His refusal is his last futile but passionate effort to retain his isolation.
But Hightower goes to the cabin and successfully delivers Lena's child. This act of giving life to Lena's child becomes symbolic of Hightower's restoration to life. Immediately after the act, he walks back to town thinking that he won't be able to sleep, but he does sleep as peacefully as Lena's newborn child. He notices for the first time the peaceful serenity of the August morning, he becomes immersed in the miracle of life, and he realizes that "life comes to the old man yet." He views the birth as a sign of good fortune and an omen of goodwill. Therefore, this act of involvement and responsibility has restored Hightower to the human race.
This was Monday morning. Monday afternoon, Hightower is faced with his second act of involvement when Christmas flees to his house for sanctuary. This violence which Hightower must face is his payment for recognizing his responsibility in life. But having assisted in the birth of Lena's child and having recognized his involvement in life, he can no longer retract. Therefore, having acknowledged a partial responsibility, he must now perform his act of complete involvement in life by attempting to assume responsibility for Joe Christmas.
And even though Hightower fails Christmas, he has achieved salvation for himself. He does not realize this until later on in the evening when the whole meaning of his life evolves in front of him "with the slow implacability of a mediaeval torture instrument." And through this wheel image, he sees that man cannot isolate himself from the faces surrounding the wheel. Man must become a part of the community and must assume responsibility not only for his own actions but also for the actions of his fellow man.
Important Quotations Explained:1. ‘It is because a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change.’
Byron Bunch thinks these words near the end of Chapter 3, when his growing friendship and intimacy with Reverend Hightower is initially traced. Eventually, Byron, out of curiosity, asks the minister why he chose to stay in Jefferson “almost within sight of” the scene of his humiliation at the hands of his parishioners, who turned their backs on him in the wake of his personal crisis upon his wife’s death. Hightower avoids the question and turns the tables, interrogating Byron about his habit of working at the mill every Saturday night instead of enjoying his leisure in town like the other men. Both men conclude facilely that it is simply “life,” that it is the course their individual destinies have taken. But both know that such a pat and simple-minded response is an elaborate avoidance of the fear, loneliness, isolation, and inability to reenter and embrace life that underlies each of their existences. Byron uses the exchange as the occasion to meditate on the nature of personal risk and the potentially harmful self-exposure involved in seeking and embracing change.
Isolation and emotional detachment are among the numerous defense mechanisms that both men employ in their approaches to their individual lives. Each engages in a strategy of emotional risk management. Hightower, by cloistering himself and cutting himself off from the outside world, believes that he is minimizing the risk that tragedy or disappointment will ever be visited on his doorstep again. This somewhat paranoid reaction and fear of the unknown comes as a response to the tension and wide gulf that exists in Light in August between the individual and the community. In a world in which the past brings a conflicted legacy of personal and public shame, individuals such as Byron and Hightower, subject to the harsh criticism and censure of the community at large, choose to avoid any situation or course of action that might compromise their sense of self.
2. Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
These sentences form the opening of Chapter 6, as young Joe Christmas is about to sneak into the dietician’s room at the orphanage to steal more of her toothpaste. Memory—and the long shadows it casts, influencing and altering the present and the future—is one of the central concerns of Faulkner’s multifaceted inquiry into the moral fiber of his characters. Both the quotation and the passage it introduces are characteristic of Faulkner’s rambling, free-associative style. At times, his descriptions and commentaries take on the quality of a prose poem, a tumbling series of images and impressions that cumulatively enacts and approximates the fleeting, half-formed images that constitute, in this case, a five-year-old’s earliest memories and sensory impressions.
For many of Faulkner’s characters, the past represents an inheritance of struggle, pain, humiliation, and shame—a legacy that the characters spend the rest of their lives trying to outrun and deny. The history of abuses and neglect that punctuate Joe’s formative years forms a record of memory more powerful than any literal, “objective” recounting of the events that make up his life. Faulkner argues that a fleeting moment—an incident as random as a little boy stealing a squirt of toothpaste—can have implications that reach far beyond the moment. The cold and oppressive hallways of the orphanage form a psychic space that Joe carries with him, in memory, for the rest of his life. Whether the characters consciously recognize or acknowledge the events that shape their lives, they retain their memories, permanent and inalterable. Beyond recollection and wonder, beyond the rational consideration of the events that mark Joe’s life, lies the more potent and inescapable history of scars, both psychic and physical, that he bears. It is collectively these memories, and the slights and abuses they represent, that make him who he is and that conspire to drive him to his tragic end.
3. Perhaps he realised that he could not escape. Anyway, he stayed, watching the two creatures that struggled in the one body like two moon-gleamed shapes.
This passage, referring to Christmas’s escalating affair with Miss Burden in Chapter 12, perfectly captures the psychic schism present in many of the novel’s characters. Faulkner strove to populate his novels with complex personalities—presences that cannot be reduced to simple, one-dimensional summation. His style and technique testify to the fact that no one version of the truth, no one set of explanations or motivations, is sufficient to explain what lies behind his characters’ often complicated and multifaceted drives and needs.
Joe Christmas is a man trapped by circumstance and by his own feckless desire to leave his past and his crimes behind him. He feels that he should extricate himself from the physical longing that binds him increasingly to Miss Burden, but he cannot. He begins, instinctively, in thinking of his sudden residence on the Burden property, to “see himself as from a distance,” unable to do anything but bear witness to Miss Burden’s physical and emotional trials. As Joe gets to know his lover more intimately, he sees a gender divide in Miss Burden—both a male and a female presence struggling for supremacy over her. Moreover, a spiritual and physical struggle splits Miss Burden. By accounts contained and invulnerable, reckless and sexually vulnerable, she fights against her own rational nature, struggling over her need to be strong and independent on one hand and her need to surrender physically and spiritually to Joe on the other. In Faulkner’s world, individuals struggle not only against community, society, and the past but also against themselves and their unstable, often fluid senses of identity.
4. [H]e believed with calm paradox that he was the volitionless servant of the fatality in which he believed that he did not believe. He was saying to himself I had to do it already in the past tense; I had to do it. She said so herself
This description is found toward the end of Chapter 12, when Christmas, seated in the garden and listening to the town clock chime ten and then eleven at night, has ultimately resolved to kill Miss Burden. The passage mirrors the frenzied, incoherent, and contradictory thoughts of a man who lashes out by choice, driven by an irrational and compulsive need to destroy his own happiness and that of others. Joe’s all-consuming desire for revenge and violence is a bestial, primal, almost nonverbal drive. It resists articulation, easy explication, or the neat and orderly explanations that language is usually able to provide.
The passage also enacts, through the spill of language that attempts to replicate Joe’s feverish impressions and conclusions, the competing and contradictory thought processes that divide Christmas. Clearly the murder is premeditated—conceived as if it were in the past, an act already performed. At the same time, Joe’s thoughts betray a paradoxical desire to be absolved of guilt, that he is a “volitionless servant,” overpowered by a force, larger and stronger than his own will or resistance, that compels him to take a life. There is a glimmer of moral sense in his tortured thoughts. Part of him recognizes that he does “not believe” in murder. But as Joe, like Reverend Hightower, increasingly occupies a world of his own making, time collapses, and the distinctions between past, present, and future—the logical progressions that link cause and effect and action and consequence—are erased. Joe is left with a resolution to kill in which he feels justified and that he feels that he has no choice but to heed.
5. “I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it’s the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around. . . . The bad men can deny it; that’s why dont anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. . . . Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad.”
Byron speaks these words at the end of Chapter 16, after he has brought the Hineses to see Reverend Hightower and is about to ask the minister to lie and claim that Joe Christmas was at Hightower’s house on the night of the murder. This quotation complements Byron’s notion that one of life’s major preoccupations is the attempt to sidestep trouble and entanglement. Byron, however, has finally come to realize that his strategy of denial and avoidance, that has served him in good stead for most of his thirty years, is no longer an acceptable means of ordering his life. He believes that there is no escaping accountability, no matter how detached or aloof one is, and that suffering and emotional duress are a harsh reality, if not a curse, that few fail to encounter.
Byron’s words bear heavily religious undertones. He has spent his days on the fringes, thinking that by living a disengaged, morally lazy existence, he has postponed any need to repent or account for his transgressions at the end of his life. About to commit himself to the safety and livelihood of Lena and her child, Byron realizes finally that suffering and hardship are unavoidable. By keeping them so stringently at bay up to this point, he has also foolishly excluded himself from love and companionship as well.