Light In August
(William Faulkner)
William Faulkner?s Light in August (Random House, 1932), set in Jefferson, Mississippi in the nineteen-twenties, is on one level the story of Joe Christmas, A part Negro orphan. Born out of wedlock and denounced and abandoned by his grandfather, Christmas? life is doomed from the moment he is born. On another level, this is a story of racism and narrow-minded Christianity. The story is told through the eyes of several characters, all of whom are in some way linked to Christmas.
The story opens thirty years after the birth of Christmas with Lena Grove, a young pregnant unmarried woman from Alabama, on a search for her baby?s father. Little known to her, the father, a no-account drifter, has hooked up with Christmas. The two are living in a shack on the property of Joanna Burden, a middle-aged spinster, with whom Christmas becomes sexually involved. This involvement leads Christmas to his ultimate demise.
Faulkner leads the reader through Christmas? life, from his birth to his death. We see how Christmas? acts are unavoidable because of his lack of nurturing, from his abandonment by his grandfather, to his cruel upbringing of his fanatical Christian adopted father. Christmas never learns how to have any type of normal relationship with another person.
Surrounding Christmas? story is the story of Lena Grove, and the story of her baby?s father. We also meet several other central characters, including: Christmas? grandfather, called Uncle Doc, Hightower, a forcibly retired preacher, and Byron Bunch, who even though he falls in love with Lena, helps her find her baby?s father. All of these characters are also affected by racism and narrow-minded Christianity.
Throughout Christmas? life, he has been shaped by society?s view of him as an inferior person because of his race. People believe his actions to be shaped by the fact that he has Negro blood, not by the fact that he has never had a normal life, with someone to care about him. Faulkner puts us in this Southern mentality; we are able to see how each of the characters thinks. Light in August is one of the best windows into the Southern past, the ?closed society?, before blacks and whites were considered equals.
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