Light in August

“She dont care nothing about womenfolks. It wasn’t any woman that got her into what she dont even call trouble. Yes, sir. You just let one of them get married or get into trouble without being married, and right then and there is where she secedes from the woman race and species and spends the balance of her life trying to get joined up with the man race. That’s why they dip snuff and smoke and want to vote.” 

From the outset of the story, the characters in Light in August view men and women in a highly divided way. Here, the speaker, a townsperson, describes men as a separate race from women. He associates corruption with men, but, along with corruption, men also have the power in this society. They dip snuff and smoke, but they also vote, an act the speaker doesn’t associate with women. 

“A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he wont fail to see a chance to meddle.” 

This is another early passage that develops the gender expectations in the world of the story. Men are weak-willed, inclined to become entangled in other’s affairs, a point that foreshadows Byron Bunch’s unending desire to help Lena despite his better judgment. Men are also dim; they will overlook good, evil, and wealth. Faulkner assigns these lines to a minor character, a choice that helps familiarize the reader with the mindset of the community the main characters must navigate. 

“And that was the first time Byron remembered that he had ever thought how a man’s name, which is supposed to be just the sound for who he is, can be somehow an augur of what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time.” 

Joe Christmas’s name sparks this thought in Byron. Throughout the rest of the story, many names enhance people’s characteristics. Christmas, Grove, Hightower, Burden, Brown, and Grimm all suggest attributes and actions about their characters. Here, Faulkner cues the reader to consider the names of his characters, then adds narrative tension by suggesting those names will foreshadow those characters’ actions.

“She lives in the big house alone, a woman of middleage. She has lived in the house since she was born, yet she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction. A Yankee, a lover of negroes, about whom in the town there is still talk of queer relations with negroes in the town and out of it, despite the fact that it is now sixty years since her grandfather and her brother were killed on the square by an ex slaveowner over a question of negro votes in a state election.” 

This passage develops the backstory of Joanna Burden and simultaneously elevates the drama of the setting. The reader learns Joanna is a not a worldly person, having lived in the same house in Jefferson her whole life. Despite being a lifelong member of Jefferson, Joanna is ostracized because of her family’s Yankee background and her acceptance of Black people. The violent deaths of Joanna’s family members demonstrate the dangerous capabilities of a community, a central message of the novel. 

“Then the town was sorry with being glad, as people sometimes are sorry for those whom they have at last forced to do as they wanted them to.” 

Following the death of Gail Hightower’s adulterous wife, the minister is shunned by his flock. He attempts to continuing preaching, but the community resorts to locking the doors of the church. While the churchgoers feel remorseful, they acknowledge this is what they wanted; they are willing to force Hightower to do something despite his passion for preaching. Again, community is shown to be harmful to the individual. 

“Byron listened quietly, thinking to himself how people everywhere are about the same, but that it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people’s names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.” 

Byron proves to be one of the most optimistic characters in Light in August, and Faulkner uses him to avoid being overly critical of the South. Byron rationalizes that people are people: All communities have their positive and negative aspects; it’s part of human nature. Still, Byron recognizes the danger of small-town thinking, keeping Faulkner’s cautionary message focused and clear. 

“They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.” 

Faulkner demonstrates his understanding of human behavior and the consequences of living dishonestly. Ironically, those who lie often become the biggest victims of their deceit. A person devoted to facts and truth can fall victim to a lie even more easily than the habitual liar; always seeing yourself as right makes you vulnerable to accepting a falsehood if you’re wrong. 

“‘You better be careful what you are saying, if it is a white man you are talking about,’ the marshal says. ‘I dont care if he is a murderer or not.’” 

The sheriff cautions Joe Brown to be careful with his claims about Joe Christmas’s supposed mixed ethnicity. Brown’s words are slanderous, but only if Joe is fully White. The sheriff’s words suggest he is more willing to defend a White murderer than an innocent Black person, elevating the tense racism prevalent in the South. 

“Then it seemed to him, sitting on the cot in the dark room, that he was hearing a myriad sounds of no greater volume—voices, murmurs, whispers: of trees, darkness, earth; people: his own voice; other voices evocative of names and times and places—which he had been conscious of all his life without knowing it, which were his life, thinking   God perhaps and me not knowing that too   He could see it like a printed sentence, fullborn and already dead   God loves me too   like the faded and weathered letters on a last year’s billboard   God loves me too.” 

This passage shows Joe Christmas to be contemplative and isolated. Numerous sounds coalesce, including his own voice, all of them connected. During the day, Joe spends most of his time in a combative state with others, but here he is unified with his environment and even acknowledges the potential of God’s love, making him a more nuanced character. 

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.” 

The opening passage of Chapter 6 centers on Joe Christmas’s childhood. Faulkner demonstrates his willingness to experiment with his prose, crafting long sentences with loose grammatical structure and combined words. Memory, knowing, and believing become the subjects of sentences, giving them agency, imbuing them with significance, and suggesting their importance to the reader. The passage’s experimental style is notably different from the previous chapters, cueing the reader that the passage is moving to another time. 

“‘You know,” she said. ‘You knew before the other children started calling him N*****. You came out here at the same time. You weren’t working here a month before that Christmas night when Charley found him on the doorstep yonder. Tell me.’ The janitor’s face was round, a little flabby, quite dirty, with a dirty stubble. His eyes were quite clear, quite gray, quite cold. They were quite mad too.” 

Joe’s childhood is troubled because of his racially ambiguous heritage, to the point where other children at a White orphanage call him the n-word because of the color of his skin. Faulkner also employs repetition in this passage, repeatedly describing the janitor as dirty, planting the seeds to later reveal the janitor is Eupheus Hines—Joe Christmas’s biological grandfather, who is also called “dirty” repeatedly. 

“It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes.”

This passage concerns Mrs. McEachern, Joe’s adoptive mother. Mrs. McEachern’s personality has been beaten down and diminished by her patriarchal husband. She is likened to a material good—metal—as opposed to a complex human being. Her hopes and desires are dim and dying. Her character serves as a cautionary tale for the consequences of mistreating women. 

“Perhaps they were not even his hands which struck at the face of the youth whom he had nurtured and sheltered and clothed from a child, and perhaps when the face ducked the blow and came up again it was not the face of that child. But he could not have been surprised at that, since it was not that child’s face which he was concerned with: it was the face of Satan, which he knew as well.” 

Mr. McEachern consistently acts sternly with Joe. Their relationship hits its boiling point, resulting in physical violence. McEachern allows himself to hit his adoptive son by disassociating; he does not see his hands as his own, and he sees Joe’s face as the face of Satan, which is appropriate for his character given his strict religious views. 

“He ought to stay away from bitches He cant help himself. He was born too close to one Is he really a n*****? He dont look like one That’s what he told Bobbie one night. But I guess she still dont know any more about what he is than he does. These country bastards are liable to be anything We’ll find out. We’ll see if his blood is black.” 

As Joe lays on the floor, beaten, he overhears the conversation taking place around him. Faulkner utilizes italics to give the dialogue a unique feel and leaves out a few periods to create the aesthetic of an overheard conversation. We also see the continued mistreatment of Joe in the South because of his racially mixed heritage, one of the central conflicts of the novel. 

“And always, sooner or later, the street ran through cities, through an identical and wellnigh interchangeable section of cities without remembered names, where beneath the dark and equivocal and symbolical archways of midnight he bedded with the women and paid them when he had the money, and when he did not have it he bedded anyway and then told them that he was a negro.” 

After the violent confrontation with his father and his failed relationship with Bobbie, Joe resorts to a vagabond lifestyle. No place feels like home. Everything is the same—nameless and dark. Joe’s being biracial continues to complicate his relationships with women and is now given further complexity. Now, he uses his mixed ethnicity to his advantage. 

“The curse of the black race is God’s curse. But the curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God’s chosen own because He once cursed him.” 

Joanna Burden explains her father’s views on race, particularly about Black and White people. Joanna’s family members have spent their lives ostracized by racists in the South, but their own views are still flawed. Nathan Burden sees both White and Black people as cursed. To him, everyone is doomed. His pessimistic view, despite his fighting for more equality, shows how complicated race relations are in the United States. 

“Dont make me have to pray yet. Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.” 

As the story unfolds, Joanna continuously proves to be a complex character. Her affair with Joe deteriorates, and her body continues to age, but Joanna doesn’t seek redemption. She wants more time to live her life the way she has been with Joe. She is fueled by her own desires and proves to be a strong-willed and powerful female character.  

“It’s like she was in two parts, and one of them knows that he is a scoundrel. But the other part believes that when a man and a woman are going to have a child, that the Lord will see that they are all together when the right time comes. Like it was God that looks after women, to protect them from men.” 

Lena Grove remains optimistic about being reunited with Lucas Burch, or rather, Joe Brown. She demonstrates a belief in a higher power, thinking that when the time is right, God will put her and Lucas in the same place. Lena becomes more complex by also recognizing that Lucas is a scoundrel; she considers her situation from multiple angles. This passage also reiterates the negative qualities of men, who cause many of the conflicts in the story. 

“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. ‘That was all I wanted,’ he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement.” 

This passage echoes a section of Chapter 5 (see Important Quote 10) when Joe walks alone, momentarily connected to the world, and hopes for God’s love. Again, Joe feels the most at ease, and the most connected with his environment, when he is alone, admiring nature, and embracing his body’s senses. Faulkner imbues the passage with peaceful and soothing imagery and sensory details, making Joe’s brief peace more impactful. 

“He never acted like either a n***** or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad. For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have been skulking and hiding in the woods, muddy and dirty and running. It was like he never even knew he was a murderer, let alone a n***** too.” 

Faulkner never lets the reader forget the normalized racism in the South. The narrowmindedness of Jefferson’s townsfolk enhances the danger for Joe and causes the community members their own pain. They can’t comprehend why Joe isn’t acting how they think a murderer should act, and they are further appalled that he can’t be easily categorized as either White or Black. Jefferson proves itself to be a town that wants conformity, to the point of anger and disgust. 

“I am not a man of God. And not through my own desire. Remember that. Not of my own choice that I am no longer a man of God. It was by the will, the more than behest, of them like you and like her and like him in the jail yonder and like them who put him there to do their will upon, as they did upon me, with insult and violence upon those who like them were created by the same God and were driven by them to do that which they now turn and rend them for having done it. It was not my choice. Remember that.” 

Hightower laments the state of his life to Byron. He doesn’t see himself as a godly man anymore because of what the actions of others have brought onto him. Hightower doesn’t display anger. Rather, he sees everyone as God’s creatures. His acceptance of Jefferson’s people, despite their mistreatment of him, shows he is a caring man who practices the principles he once preached. 

“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. They cant deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that’s why dont anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good cant.” 

This passage builds on Faulkner’s comments on lying and how truthful people can deceive themselves. It isn’t enough to simply be good; there is still a price to be paid, and unlike a bad person, it’s the good ones who are unable to dodge the payment that comes their way. Appropriately, the words come from Hightower, a man who has always tried to do the right thing, only to lose his position in the church and live a life of semi-hermitage. 

“He did not kill the minister. He merely struck him with the pistol and ran on and crouched behind that table and defied the black blood for the last time, as he had been defying it for thirty years. He crouched behind that overturned table and let them shoot him to death, with that loaded and unfired pistol in his hand.” 

Joe Christmas meets his end. Joe, who has proven himself capable of behaving violently—potentially killing his adoptive father, hitting women, and striking Hightower—avoids causing more death. As he’s gunned down, he never fires his pistol. His choice to withhold more violent urges makes his character more complex and his death more impactful.