Nessie School of Languages

 PLOT

    William Faulkner?s Light in August
deals with three controversial stories of three very different people: Lena
Grove, Joe Christmas, and Reverend Gail Hightower. Twenty-year-old Lena Grove
was looking for her unborn child’s father for four weeks. She was walking along
country roads and depending on the kindness of strangers. She feels confident
that the Lord will reunite her "family". She has heard that her
former lover, Lucas Burch, is working in Jefferson, but when she gets there she
finds  Byron Bunch instead. Her arrival
changes Byron’s solitary life, because he falls in love with her. He finds her
a place to stay on the outskirts of town and moves to a tent next to her. When
she is about to give birth, Byron sends his best friend, Reverend Gail Hightower,
to help her. Lena is the centre of his life, but she has refused marrying him.
However, he  arranges for the sheriff to
bring Lena’s runaway lover (Lucas Burch, alias Joe Brown) to her cabin. When
Burch escapes through the back door, Lena has to start her search again.

    Doc Hines suspects that his daughter
Milly’s lover is half black. So he kills the lover and deliberately lets Milly
die in childbirth. On Christmas day, Hines leaves Milly’s child on the steps of
an orphanage. The staff names the child Joe Christmas. At the age of five, Joe
enters the dietitian’s room to eat something, and she finds him hiding there.
She informs the orphanage  that Christmas
may be half black. The other children call him "nigger." They arrange
for Christmas to be adopted by a religious farmer. Three years later, Joe
Christmas begins to rebel against that farmer, Simon McEachern, as he refuses
to learn religion. His defiance and punishment continues until Joe’s life with
the McEacherns ends in a violent confrontation over Joe’s first love affair.
His girlfriend, Bobbie Allen, is a prostitute. When Joe escapes his father
searches for him and finds him with Bobbie at a dance. After being hit, Joe
strikes his father with a chair. Believing he has killed him, Joe wants to run
away with Bobbie. But she is hysterically afraid and angry. She calls him a
"nigger," then does nothing as her friends beat him. After these
unhappy experiences, Joe spends fifteen years wandering from city to city,
struggling with his racial identity. When he arrives in Jefferson, he meets
Joanna Burden, a member of a family of abolitionists, who lets him stay in an
old slave cabin. One night he enters her bedroom and rapes her. Joanna becomes
sexually passionate about him. But almost two years later, Joanna loses
interest in sex and turns to religion. She asks Joe to declare himself a black
and to work in a black law firm. The idea revolts him. She points a gun at him,
but he kills her first. The town of Jefferson knows nothing of Christmas’s
upbringing nor of his relationship with Joanna. Then Joanna’s body is found,
and based on the accusations of Christmas’s companion, Joe Brown (Lena’s Lucas
Burch), the people now regard Christmas as a "nigger murderer." Doc
Hines and his wife hear of the arrest and travel to Jefferson. Doc is eager to
have Christmas lynched, but his wife tries hard to save him. Meanwhile,
Christmas escapes from the sheriff and runs to Hightower’s house, who tries to
provide him with an alibi for the night of the murder.

    Gail Hightower was once a minister in
Jefferson, but his sermons focused more on the 
death of his Confederate grandfather than on God. The people found him
strange, and, when his wife died in scandalous circumstances, his congregation
forced him out from his church. For years, he has lived in isolation.
Hightower’s best friend Byron Bunch, keeps him informed about both Lena Grove
and Joe Christmas. His effort to save Joe comes too late, and he is killed.
Hightower thinks back on his life and on his obsession with his Confederate
grandfather’s violent death. He at last realises that, as a result of that
obsession, he had lost his wife and he feels that he  is dying too.

MAIN THEME:

RACIAL IDENTITY

    The deep Southeners concern
with racial identity is one of Light in August‘s central themes. When
people are suspicious of Joe Christmas?s coming from black ancestry, they treat
him completely differently from the way they do with white people. Many of the
characters in this novel seem twisted by their own concept of race. It goes
without saying, that some protagonists (Joe Christmas, Joanna Burden, Nathaniel
Burden, Doc Hines, and Percy Grimm) are among them. Another example is the
attitude that shows the Jefferson sheriff, Watt Kennedy, who seems a decent
man, nonetheless he whips a black although it was unnecessary.  But even many of the characters who don’t share
this kind of behaviour, take for granted that treating blacks inhumanly is
acceptable.

    Most of Light in August
is set in the towns, villages, and countryside of the early 1930s  South. It is a land of racial prejudice and
stern religion. Community ties are still strong. They identify an outsider
easily, and people are always gossiping about their neighbours? comings and
goings. The reviewers on Northamerican Literature have made clear that in this
part of the country the past still lives on. For example, the cabin in which
Joe Christmas stays and where Lena Grove gives birth, is a slave cabin dating
back to before the Civil War, thus before the abolition of slavery. We should
also remark that he South of this period is still a region extremely close to
nature. When you leave the the town, you find the woods immediately. As some
reviewers point out[1], all
these aspects of the setting lend themselves especially well to one of the
writer’s favourite themes: the relationship between the community and the
individual and between the present and the past.

    On the other hand, two of the
novel five major characters live in the shadow of their dead ancestors. But you
could interpret their relationship to these forebears in different ways.
Firstly, you could point to a fact of decline and state that the present
doesn’t live up to the heroic days of yesterday. Secondly, you could say that
the problems of the present come from a failure to get rid of the burdensome
past. Gail Hightower’s and Joanna Burden?s lives are the clearest examples of
this fact. Gail?s grandfather was a 
lover of life, but Hightower fails both his wife and his Congregation
and spends the rest of his life cut off from other people. As far as  Joanna Burden’s forefathers are concerned,
they were not originally from the South, but their emigration to Jefferson
makes them part of the South?s history. She spends most of the time at home,
feels homesick whenever she leaves Jefferson, and never marries or has
children. She is the victim of the stern religion and unbearable racism that her
father taught her, which he learned from his own father. What might
surprise  the readers though, is the fact
that the freest character in the novel is definitely Lena Grove, who seems to
live entirely in the present.

3

LITERARY TECHNIQUE

   
An objective third-person narrator tells most of Light in August‘s
story. It shows the writer?s great ability to move quickly from one character
to another, that?s precisely what is 
unusual about this novel as his point of view  shifts so often. This technique is very good
as far as the readers are concerned, because we get different visions of the
same character. We first hear of Joe Christmas from Byron’s point of view, who
appears to be a friendly character, so we tend to perfectly accept what he states.
Later we see Joe Christmas from his own point of view, but without any access
to his deepest thoughts and feelings. But in the sixth chapter, the narrator
gets deeply into Joe’s sordid memories and in this way we are given a totally
different image of his personality. What?s more, in Chapter 19 the readers are
told about his final escape and murder from the policeman?s point of view. Some
critics point out to the fact that one of Faulkner’s purposes in this approach
is to contrast public images with private realities. The Joe Christmas that the
town of Jefferson knows is different from the one seen from within, and
Faulkner’s shifting point of view keeps us aware of that and other big
contrasts.

    Light in August
connects brilliantly three different stories. Lena Grove?s one begins and ends
the novel. But none of these stories are chronologically related. For example,
one of the novel’s most tragic  event,
Joanna Burden?s killing, has already occurred before Lena Grove arrives in
Jefferson at the end of Chapter 1, but we don’t see Joe Christmas enter Joanna
Burden’s bedroom to kill her until the end of Chapter 12. Thus, the first
problem of Light in August’s structure is whether these three stories
form a whole unified novel, since apart from the accidental fact that all three
main protagonists are in Jefferson for some days between Burden’s murder and
Christmas’s death, their stories are very different indeed.

    These three characters
contrast with each other in different ways as well. Some reviewers have stated
that the novel’s unity comes from elements other than the structure, for
example, from the themes or symbolism. Others say that Faulkner unified the
novel by making Lena’s story enter Christmas’s. They point out that she opens
and closes Light in August as a way of locating Joe Christmas’s
individual tragedy in the wide context of ordinary and reasonably happy people
like Lena Grove and Byron Bunch. In addition, others argue that Faulkner
deliberately left his novel loose and open as a way of presenting a truer
picture of the stream of life than if he had followed a more classical artistic
focus

PERSONAL
OPINION

    Prize Novel winner William
Faulkner is said to make use of a very small number of characters in lots of his
novels, most of which represent the various levels of a single region: the
South. We believe this ia very important point to mention, because the writer
wants to give a proper portrayal of the kind of life the southerners live,
which has a close relationship to their own personality. He also shows his deep
concern with the evils of modern society.

    Light in August is
considered by a lot of reviewers to be a great masterpiece. It shows how racism
has made the white community of the South crazy. The central character is Joe
Christmas, a man who is half black and half white. He belongs then to neither
race. His unhappiness and confusion lead him to kill the woman who had
protected him. As far as the readers are concerned, we must learn from this
fact that the bad treatment of people may lead to immediate tragedy, which is
unbearable and unforgivable for the rest of the society. The writer?s
descriptions of human goodness are as powerful as his descriptions of human
evil. Black or white (he is said to use more black people as his good
characters), these people show their goodness in their relationship with nature
and their ability to love. William Faulkner doesn?t help the readers to follow
the plot at all. It is not easy for us, since we are put into the centre of the
story without any preparation. We must put together the facts of the story by
ourselves.

    This  novel also seems to lead to a hard criticism
on Christianity as far as the treatment of several characters is concerned:
from the orthodox Calvinism of Simon McEachern to the stern religiosity of Doc
Hines and the stories preached by Calvin Burden. We get the picture of a
Christian religion as vindictive, racist and even misogynist. Although the
writer still wants to tell us that there are good religious men, such Gail
Hightower, a minister of God who refuses to own slaves and works as a doctor
after the Civil War. On the other hand, there is also a hard treatment of the
ever controversial relationship between man and woman[2].

    Faulkner was one of the great
writers who belonged to the Lost Generation, one of the main features of whom
is their strong dislike for the post-war world and its beliefs in the value of
art. We must keep in mind that a great deal of people had lost their American
ideals, and the growth of racism was a real danger for the cohesion of the
society.

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