52 pages • 1 hour read
William FaulknerLight in August
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1932A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Byron visits Hightower again. Joe has been caught. Brown, too, is in jail. Hearing this news, Hightower cries. He’s always chosen to stay in Jefferson, but he laments the drama in town now that he’s old and no longer a man of God. Byron further adds to the tension, revealing an older woman has come to town: “She has been lost for thirty years. But she is found now. She’s [Joe’s] grandmother” (365). Byron leaves for church. Hightower watches his neighbors make their way to the sermon from his window. He mourns people’s inability to escape violence, and worse, their desire for it. Joe’s fate looks bleak. Hightower knows the town will kill him happily: “They will do it gladly, gladly. That’s why it is so terrible, terrible, terrible” (368). After church, Byron returns, accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Hines. Mrs. Hines tells Byron and Hightower her family’s story.
When she is 18, Mr. and Mrs. Hines’s daughter, Milly, has an affair with a man from a traveling circus. The man might be Black or Mexican, but his race is never confirmed. Horrified his daughter slept with a non-White man, Mr. Hines tracks down the man and shoots him. He looks for a doctor who will abort Milly’s baby, claiming the child is an abomination, but he can’t find one. When Milly goes into labor at their family home, Mr. Hines patrols the property with a shotgun, preventing Mrs. Hines from leaving to get a doctor. Milly dies giving birth to her baby boy. Mrs. Hines cares for the baby, but then Mr. Hines takes him away without notice. The couple moves so Mr. Hines can start a new job, but he won’t disclose what he’s doing to his wife. She wonders about the baby, and Mr. Hines insists the baby is dead to them.
Mr. Hines cuts in with his own story. He admits to taking Joe to an orphanage and working as a janitor there. For five years, he watched Joe closely and saw the cruelty of the other children, who constantly called him the n-word. Still, he sees Joe Christmas as an abomination, the child’s very name a blasphemy of Christ’s day of birth. Mr. Hines wants Joe dead. Mrs. Hines wants Joe to live. Hightower wonders what he’s supposed to do. Byron and Mrs. Hines ask him to lie to save Joe: Tell the police Joe visits him regularly and that he wasn’t home when Joanna was killed. Hightower, horrified by the request, refuses and tells everyone to leave.
Chapter 17 Summary
Early the next morning, Lena goes into labor. Byron frantically rounds up help. As he does so, Lena’s pregnancy becomes more vivid than ever before: “It was like it was not until Mrs Hines called me and I heard her and saw her face and knew that Byron Bunch was nothing in this world to her right then, that I found that she is not a virgin” (401). Byron summons Hightower and a doctor, and Lena delivers her baby. Stuck in the past, Mrs. Hines calls Lena and her baby Milly and Joey.
After the delivery, Hightower walks home. He eats and falls asleep for several hours, then returns to the Burden property. He regrets that Joanna didn’t live to see Lena’s baby: “To have not lived only a week longer, until luck returned to this place. Until luck and life returned to these barren and ruined acres” (406-407). He checks on Lena, who is alone now. Mr. Hines slipped away into town, and Mrs. Hines chased after him. Byron left to tell Brown about his newborn child. Hightower wants Lena to let Byron go. Falling in love with a single mother isn’t how Byron’s life needs to play out, but Byron is too naïve to get himself out of it. Lena reveals she’s already denied Byron’s marriage proposal. Still, Byron is a free man, and she won’t stop him from following her if that’s what he wants to do. Lena doubts she’ll see Byron or Brown again and cries while Hightower consoles her.
Hightower searches for Byron at the mill but learns that he quit that very day. The bookkeeper recommends looking for Byron at the courthouse, where Joe’s trial is commencing. Hightower goes home instead. He pities Byron. He pities the town. He mourns the inevitable death of Joe.
Chapter 18 Summary
Byron goes to town to convince the sheriff to let Brown see his newborn baby, but the sheriff is busy with the trial. Byron contemplates the details of the trial and the jury. People in town hardly knew Joe or Joanna, and yet they’re passing judgement on the incident. He considers his own reputation: too nice for his own good—a sucker. An odd sensation flows through him: “as if each time his insides were afraid that next breath they would not be able to give far enough and that something terrible would happen” (417). He decides he’ll leave Jefferson soon.
Byron finally speaks to the sheriff about Brown’s newborn. The sheriff permits Brown to go to the cabin with a police escort. Brown has no idea Lena is waiting for him. The sheriff wishes Byron well and thinks he’ll return to Jefferson someday. Byron rides his mule to Brown’s cabin and watches Brown go in while a deputy waits outside. Byron presses onward. He ascends a nearby hill, climbing higher and higher on his mule, and enjoys the view. He looks back at the cabin. Brown sneaks out the back window, the deputy unaware, and runs. Byron stays idle, then springs into action, surprising himself: “before he is aware that his brain has telegraphed his hand he has turned the mule from the road and is galloping along the ridge which parallels the running man’s course” (425).
Simultaneously, Brown is taken to the cabin. He’s told that’s where his reward money is for helping find Joe. Brown finds Lena waiting for him inside and lies to her, claiming he sent her a letter a month ago. Lena senses Brown’s apathy toward her. He promises they can get settled once he gets the money owed to him. Then, he escapes out the window. He cuts through the woods. He finds a cabin where a Black family lives. Brown pays one of the children to deliver a letter into town, asking to have the reward money sent back to him with the child. While Brown waits for the child to return, Byron confronts him. Brown attacks Byron, beating him handedly. Before he can receive the money he so desperately wants, Brown jumps onto a train, and it carries him away. Byron, injured, heads back into town. On his way back into Jefferson, a passing wagon mentions Joe Christmas has been killed.
Chapters 16-18 Analysis
Chapters 16-18 bring the story into the final act and puts some of the ensemble cast into the most intense situations seen so far. Up until this point, Hightower and Byron’s sections have mostly served to give the reader additional information about Jefferson. Their nightly chats are passive and calm. Chapter 16 upends this rhythm with the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Hines, whom Faulkner continues to use to add more stakes to the story. The moral dilemma Byron and Mrs. Hines put Hightower in causes an outburst.
Similarly, Byron’s action has occurred largely off the page; he usually summarizes his day to Hightower. Chapters 16-18 place him in the center of the unfolding drama, just as Hightower feared. The first chapter introduced Lena’s pregnancy, and Chapter 17 pays off on that setup. Her delivery propels Byron forward, putting him in new and dynamic situations. Byron himself recognizes this change, remarking to himself: ‘Byron Bunch borning a baby. If I could have seen myself now two weeks ago, I would not have believed my own eyes” (392). Byron surprises himself again when he goes after Brown in Chapter 18. This time, Byron fails. His growth as a character isn’t complete, and the world proves to be a place that can still overpower him. Light in August takes its time to let its plot unfold. Faulkner develops backstories and build the world’s history. However, as the story moves into its final chapters, the plot picks up with each chapter. Idle characters like Hightower lash out, and timid characters like Byron try to be courageous.
The themes of Light of August continue to become clearer and more nuanced. Byron, a kind-hearted character, expresses doubt about Jefferson. After working at the mill for seven years, Byron has come to see little value in the town he’s called home: “There ain’t nothing in these little towns’ (421). Having one of the most optimistic characters in the story be critical of Jefferson puts greater emphasis on Faulkner’s dissection and critique of the small town. Hightower’s cynicism continues to come out during his lonely stream of thoughts. Once a minister, he sees the world differently now that he’s lived a shunned life: “that people from which he sprang among whom he lives who can never take either pleasure or catastrophe or escape from either, without brawling over it” (367-368). Humanity saddens Hightower to the point he turns away from God, diving into books instead. Literature offers him escape, a pleasant journey into oblivion: “It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language he does not even need to not understand” (318). Hightower’s move away from God and people toward literature and unknowing creates a cautionary tale about people and faith. A godly town can still breed sadness and alienation and cause others to lose their faith in a higher power.
Mr. and Mrs. Hines continue to factor into the story. They don’t become main characters but heighten the stakes and contribute to the story’s themes and motifs. Mrs. Hines is another woman who suffers at the hands of a patriarchal brute, like Mrs. McEachern before her. When Mr. Hines erupts into another fit, screaming for Joe’s death, she tells Byron and Hightower her husband has never changed: “For fifty years he has been like that. For more than fifty years, but for fifty years I have suffered it” (372). Her character offers another example of how women suffer in a stringent patriarchal society. In Chapter 16, Mr. Hines shows himself to be a cruel father. He allows his own daughter to die in childbirth and gives up his grandson for adoption because the child is biracial. His story is a cautionary tale about how toxic masculinity can hurt families. His intense hatred of Joe also reinforces just how alienated Joe is in Southern society; members of his own family won’t accept him. Throughout Chapters 16-18, whether through main or supporting characters, each theme becomes more intense, heightening the narrative tension leading into the final chapters.
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