LIGHT IN AUGUST

William Faulkner

Throughout a career spanning nearly four decades, William Faulkner earned and enjoyed one of the most esteemed reputations of any twentieth-century novelist. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897, he is best known for a series of seminal novels that explore the South’s historical legacy, its fraught and often tensely violent present, and its uncertain future. These major works include the novels The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), all set in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

By creating an imagined setting, Faulkner enables his characters to inhabit a fully realized world that serves as a mirror to and microcosm of the South as a whole. Faulkner’s legendary county acts as a safe and distant, yet magnifying, lens through which he examines the practices, folkways, and attitudes that divided and united the people of the South since the nation’s inception. As Faulkner’s stories unfold, his characters attempt to eke out an emotional existence, but poverty, racism, violence, lack of education, and other factors conspire to lace their lives with tragedy.

Faulkner was particularly interested in the moral implications of history, depicting a time in which the South was emerging from the Civil War and Reconstruction and attempting to shake off the stigma of slavery. He portrays the South’s residents as being caught in competing and evolving modes, torn between a new and an older, more tenaciously rooted world order. Religion and politics frequently fall short of their implied goals of providing order and guidance and serve only to complicate and divide. Meanwhile, society—a repressive if not asphyxiating entity, with its gossip, judgment, and harsh pronouncements—conspires to thwart the desires and ambitions of individuals struggling to unearth and embrace their identities. Across Faulkner’s fictional landscapes, individual characters often stage epic struggles, prevented from realizing their potential or establishing and asserting a firm sense of their place in the world.

As he does in many of his novels, Faulkner takes a decidedly modernist approach in Light in August, abandoning a conventional, linear story in order to recount the inner lives and motivations of his characters. During a brief, fateful period of time in the book’s title month, the lives of various characters overlap and intersect in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Along the way, time is fractured, shifted, and manipulated, as events are recounted from one perspective, then revisited from an entirely new angle, integrating the complexity of another—often seemingly unrelated—character’s viewpoint. Ultimately, no one approach emerges as reliable or as the complete, full version of what transpires. Instead, a multiplicity of subjective voices emerges, dissecting and relating events, sometimes erroneously or in a biased manner.

Similarly, Faulkner refrains from using a single, unified narrative voice. His long, sinuous sentences attempt to replicate the leaps and erratic bounds of his characters’ often stream-of-consciousness thought patterns. He employs colloquialisms, regional dialect, compound words of his own invention, monologues, unconscious thought, and various asides to create a complex and richly textured world as various and uncontainable as the real world itself.

Light in August is steeped in violence, preoccupied with the distortions and distractions of religion and racism—perhaps influenced by the fact that Faulkner started the novel soon after his wife, Estelle, gave birth to a daughter who died after only a few days in January 1931. Using the working title Dark House, Faulkner explored and plumbed the often dark interior spaces of his characters, who are wounded in various ways by their forays into the world. Dogged by guilt, shame, and humiliation, they strive—some ceaselessly, others successfully, and still others for naught—for forgiveness, salvation, and a place to call their own.

Plot Overview

Lena Grove, a pregnant teenager, has made her way to Mississippi in search of her baby’s father. She hitches a ride into the small town of Jefferson, which is home to a planing mill. One of the workers at the mill, Joe Christmas, is a brooding, racially ambiguous man who appeared suddenly at the mill one day in search of a job. After gaining employment, he was soon joined at the mill by another man named Joe Brown. The two formed a partnership, making and selling liquor illegally, and eventually quit their jobs.

Another of the mill workers, Byron Bunch, is intrigued and unsettled when Lena Grove suddenly appears at the mill one day. He tells the town’s disgraced former minister, Reverend Gail Hightower, of his efforts to care for the girl. Soon, Lena comes to realize that the man she seeks—her baby’s father, Lucas Burch—is really Joe Brown. Upon Lena’s arrival in town, Brown is being held in the town jail after the murder of a local woman, Joanna Burden, and the burning of her home. Joe Christmas, Miss Burden’s occasional lover, is the chief suspect.

The narrative then shifts to explore several of the characters’ pasts. As a young minister, Gail Hightower secures a church in Jefferson to feed his obsession with his grandfather, a Confederate cavalryman who was killed in the town during the Civil War. Hightower’s young wife is unfaithful and grapples with mental health problems. She eventually dies in a fall from the window of a Memphis hotel room where she is staying with another man. A scandal ensues, and the Jefferson parishioners turn on Hightower, who is forced to step down.

As a child, Joe Christmas is left on the steps of an orphanage. When the facility’s dietician mistakenly believes that Joe has overheard her having sex with a young doctor in her room, she worries she will lose her job. To eliminate this risk, she threatens to expose young Joe’s biracial background and thus have him transferred to an orphanage for black children. She discusses the plan with the orphanage’s janitor, who kidnaps Joe and takes him to Little Rock, where he is found and returned, only to be adopted two weeks later by a sternly religious man, Mr. McEachern, and his wife.

Joe’s new foster father subjects him to regular beatings. As Joe grows and enters puberty, he eventually crosses paths with Bobbie, a prostitute who works as a waitress in the nearby town. When Mr. McEachern catches his son at a dance with Bobbie, a fight erupts, and Joe kills his foster father by smashing a chair over his head. Abandoned by Bobbie and her cohorts, Joe embraces a life on the run and wanders for more than fifteen years, eventually making his way to Jefferson.

In Jefferson, Joe Christmas stays in the cabin on Joanna Burden’s property, and the two quickly become lovers. Their relationship is marked by passion, violence, and long periods in which they ignore each other. Miss Burden wants a child and claims to be pregnant, but Joe is strongly opposed to the idea. After a time, Joe Brown comes to live with Joe Christmas in his cabin. Miss Burden tries to help Joe Christmas financially, but her meddling only provokes his ire. One night, he savagely attacks and kills her with a razor after she tries to fire a pistol at him in an apparent attempt at a murder-suicide.

Miss Burden’s nephew in New Hampshire offers a $1,000 reward for the capture of his aunt’s killer. Search parties with bloodhounds comb the countryside for the fugitive Joe Christmas, who eludes capture for days, running to the point of hunger and exhaustion. Lena, meanwhile, moves into the cabin that the two Joes had shared in order to prepare for the birth of her baby; Byron Bunch stays in a tent nearby.

Joe Christmas is apprehended on the streets of nearby Mottstown. His biological maternal grandfather, Uncle Doc Hines, makes his way through the crowd to curse Joe and call for his death. When the officials from Jefferson arrive to take charge of the prisoner, Mrs. Hines breaks through the crowd as well, hoping to see the face of the grandson who her husband told her died as a child. The Hineses then take the train to Jefferson together.

Byron and the Hineses arrive at Hightower’s house and reveal that Joe Christmas’s father was a circus worker who tried to run off with the Hineses’ daughter before Uncle Doc shot and killed him. Eventually, Uncle Doc placed the baby in the orphanage in Memphis where he worked as a janitor. Byron wants Hightower to lie and claim that Joe Christmas was with him, at his house, on the night of Joanna Burden’s murder. Hightower becomes angry and asks them to leave.

Lena goes into labor, but by the time Byron arrives with the doctor, Hightower has already delivered the baby. Assisting in the delivery is Mrs. Hines, who mistakenly believes that Lena is her long-dead daughter, Milly, and that the newborn is her grandson, Joe Christmas. Byron arranges to have Joe Brown sent to Lena’s cabin; upon arriving, Brown is shocked to see Lena holding his newborn son, slips out a back window, and runs away. Byron sees Brown escape and tries to stop him, but the much larger man beats Byron soundly and escapes on a passing train. Joe Christmas, meanwhile, escapes from his captors as well, while he is being led across the town square. Before long, he is tracked down, shot, killed, and castrated in Hightower’s kitchen by a bounty hunter named Percy Grimm. Afterward, the aging Hightower muses on his past and prepares for his own death.

After a road trip, a local furniture mover near Jefferson recounts to his wife how he gave a ride to a curious couple—a woman with a newborn child accompanied by a man who was not the child’s father. The couple—Lena and Byron—was halfheartedly in search of the baby’s biological father, as the man drove them deeper into Tennessee.

Character List

Joe Christmas - The novel’s protagonist, also known as Joe Hines or Joe McEachern. In his first appearance in the novel, Joe is a young man in his early thirties, dressed in creased serge trousers, a soiled white shirt and tie, and a stiff-brimmed straw hat. A wanderer, he has a rootless, overly independent quality to him that others frequently misinterpret as ruthlessness, loneliness, or pride. Biracial, he is often mistaken for—and “passes” for—a white man. Silent, unfriendly, and brooding, his face consistently projects a cold and quiet look of contempt. Complex, conflicted, and multifaceted, Joe overtly sabotages the little happiness that he is able to find for himself and consistently waylays any of his own attempts to find a place of belonging. Ultimately, this

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Lena Grove - A pregnant teenager from Alabama. Orphaned at twelve, Lena comes to Jefferson on foot and by hitching rides on wagons along the way from her home outside Doane’s Mills. Inexperienced in the ways of the world, she is determined to find the man, Lucas Burch, who made her pregnant and left her behind with the promise he would eventually send for her. “Young, pleasantfaced, candid, friendly, and alert,” Lena is an easygoing presence who seems unconcerned about her unsettled status in life.

Read an in-depth analysis of Lena Grove.

Reverend Gail Hightower - A defrocked minister in Jefferson. Tall, overweight, with skin the color of “flour sacking,” Hightower was once the minister of one of the town’s major churches. He sought the post because his grandfather, a Confederate cavalryman, was gunned down in Jefferson while stealing chickens. Described as a “fifty-year-old outcast,” he was forced to step down after his promiscuous wife died in a fall from a hotel window in Memphis. Refusing to leave Jefferson, Hightower lives as a recluse, displaying his toughness and tenacity in withstanding the gossip, meddling, coercion, and eventual beatings he suffers at the hands of the town residents who had hoped to drive him off.

Read an in-depth analysis of Reverend Gail Hightower.

Byron Bunch - A mill worker in Jefferson and the man who is initially misidentified to Lena as Lucas Burch, the father of her baby. In his thirties, hardworking, and devout, Bunch leads a quietly regimented life—working six days a week and then directing the choir of a rural church—that has continued uninterrupted in the same routine for years. His life drastically shifts, however, when he meets the young, pregnant Lena, whose vulnerability and plight trigger his natural instinct to protect and selflessly help others.

Read an in-depth analysis of Byron Bunch.

Joe Brown (a.k.a. Lucas Burch) - A gambler, bootlegger, and con artist. Young and tall, with a distinctive white scar beside his mouth, Joe Brown first appears in dirty overalls in search of work at the mill. Lazy, yet alert to any situation he can turn to his advantage, Joe moves in a confident swagger but has the tendency to jerk his head to the side and to look periodically over his shoulder. A known liar and exaggerator, his shady past and questionable dealings make him an object of mockery and even contempt in the eyes of those who can see through his veneer of self-satisfaction and confidence.

Joanna Burden - A reclusive lifelong resident of Jefferson. Born and raised in the house where she still lives on the outskirts of town, Miss Burden is still considered a northerner, as her family relocated to the South after Reconstruction. Her grandfather and brother, who supported voting rights for blacks, were killed by a local man, Colonel Sartoris, in an infamous incident that town residents still recount. Subject to rumors and said to have had sexual relations with black men, Miss Burden corresponds with and advises the faculties, trustees, and students of various black colleges in the South, occasionally traveling to the campuses to meet with them in person.

Simon McEachern - Joe Christmas’s foster father. Mr. McEachern is a thick-bodied man with a closely cropped brown beard and cold, light-colored eyes. Stern and devout, his religiosity borders on fanaticism and far outweighs the limited reserves of kindness and sympathy that he is able to muster. Blinded by his extreme faith and belief in divine retribution, he displays a marked contempt for humanity and the folly and sin of others. He upholds that hard labor, self-sacrifice, self-denial, and personal suffering are the hallmarks of a life lived in an upstanding and staunchly moral manner. However, he is prone to violence, and his unyielding and authoritarian presence compromises his essential humanity and ultimately provokes the homicidal rage of his foster son.

Mrs. McEachern - Joe Christmas’s foster mother. Mrs. McEachern is a timid, hunched woman with a weather-beaten face that makes her look considerably older than her husband. A silent, cringing, somewhat invisible presence in the family, she tries to earn her son’s love and respect by countering her husband’s violence with excessive doting and kindness. She also attempts to forge a closer bond with her adopted son by creating and indulging in secrets that only the two of them share.

Mr. Hines (a.k.a. Uncle Doc) - Joe Christmas’s biological grandfather. Uncle Doc is an unkempt, angry, and spiteful man whose violence and extreme behavior have landed him in jail more than once. Infamous for his crazed ravings, he uses his religious fundamentalism to justify his implicit belief in white superiority. His extreme, unyielding sense of right and propriety pollutes his better intentions, causing him to punish and betray those who are closest to him. He shuffles around in a near-catatonic state that is interrupted only by his boisterous attempts to incite the residents of first Mottstown and then Jefferson to lynch his grandson.

Mrs. Hines - Joe Christmas’s biological grandmother. Short, obese, and round-faced, Mrs. Hines is a shadow figure whom few in town recognize, even though she has lived there for years. She is eccentric and emotional, and her tenuous grasp on reality is compromised when the grandson she thought was dead is charged with the murder of Miss Burden. Mrs. Hines’s passivity and deference to her husband have led to a series of tragedies—mistakes she desires to make up for only when it is too late.

Miss Atkins - The dietician at the orphanage. Insecure and spiteful, she allows her paranoia and fear stoke her racist attitudes and vengeful nature. In order to exorcise the guilt she feels at her own sexual indiscretions, she alerts the matron to young Joe Christmas’s biracial background, thus speeding his adoption and removal from the orphanage.

Bobbie Allen - A prostitute passing for a waitress at the diner in Jefferson. Crude and earthy, with large hands, Bobbie brings her Memphis street smarts to Max and Mame’s seedy restaurant, where she seduces Joe Christmas and takes advantage of his inexperience and naïveté.

Themes, Motifs & SymbolsThemes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

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