Light in August

Joe Christmas and Race

Joe Christmas is found as an infant on Christmas Day at a Memphis orphanage—hence his name—and nobody knows who he is or where he came from. The man who eventually takes him in, Simon McEachern, is a rigid Calvinist who beats scripture into the boy with the conviction that he is saving him. What McEachern cannot give Joe is an identity. Someone tells Joe as a child that he might have Black blood, and the rumor lodges in him like a splinter: for the rest of his life he cannot inhabit either race. He moves between Black and white worlds, telling each that he belongs to the other, provoking the violence that seems to him the only honest response to the impossibility of his position.

As an adult in Jefferson, Mississippi, he enters into a relationship with Joanna Burden, a Northern woman from an abolitionist family whose own isolation in the white South mirrors his. Their affair moves through three phases—raw need, religious mania, and something approaching murder—and ends in a violence that makes the town’s latent racism suddenly explicit and purposeful. Joe is captured, escapes, is recaptured. What happens to him at the hands of Percy Grimm—a man who has found in racial purity the same total certainty that McEachern found in Calvinist scripture—is one of the most horrifying scenes in American fiction, rendered with a precision that makes looking away impossible.

What Faulkner insists on throughout is that Joe may not have Black ancestry at all. The racial category that destroys him is a rumor, a social fact with no required biological substrate. This is the point.

Lena and Hightower

Light in August opens not with Joe Christmas but with Lena Grove, a young woman from Alabama walking toward Jefferson in search of Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child. She is serene, unhurried, and completely certain that everything will work out. It will not work out in the way she imagines, but her equanimity is not delusion—it is a form of faith in motion that the novel treats with genuine warmth. Lena’s story begins and ends the novel, and the comedy of her sections—mild, pastoral, anchored in appetite and forward movement—creates a counterpoint to Joe’s tragedy that is structural and thematic rather than decorative.

Reverend Gail Hightower is the third strand. He came to Jefferson thirty years ago as a Presbyterian minister, consumed from childhood by a fantasy of his Confederate grandfather dying gloriously in a cavalry raid. His obsession with this image—which is also an obsession with death and stasis—destroyed his marriage and his ministry; his wife’s death by suicide in a Memphis hotel room ended whatever standing he had in the community. Now he sits at his window at dusk every evening, watching the ghost-cavalry ride past. When Joe Christmas is recaptured, the paths of all three stories converge at Hightower’s house, and the reverend—who has spent thirty years refusing life—is forced into a single act of intervention that comes too late and is not enough.

The three stories are not parallel so much as contrapuntal. Lena survives by moving forward; Hightower dies by moving backward; Joe is destroyed by being unable to move in any direction.

The Most Accessible Faulkner

Readers and teachers consistently recommend Light in August as the better starting point for Faulkner than The Sound and the Fury, and there are real arguments for this view. The prose, though unmistakably Faulknerian in its long periodic sentences and its habit of circling a point from multiple directions, is more regularly penetrable than the stream-of-consciousness extremity of Benjy’s section in The Sound and the Fury. The three narrative strands provide enough forward momentum to carry a reader through the difficulty, and the central subject—race as a social construction capable of destroying human beings—is so urgently present in American life that no historical distance is required to feel it.

That said, Light in August is not an easy novel: at 507 pages, it requires sustained commitment, and Faulkner’s religious symbolism (Joe Christmas’s initials, the date of his discovery, the date of his death) is laid on thickly enough to feel heavy-handed to some readers. The violence is extreme and deliberately so.

For those who have already read The Sound and the Fury, Light in August is the essential next step: it enlarges the Yoknapatawpha world and shows Faulkner engaging directly with the racial crime that The Sound and the Fury addresses more obliquely through Dilsey’s sections. Read alongside Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which also engages with Faulkner’s world and techniques, it becomes part of one of American fiction’s most important ongoing conversations about slavery, race, and the bodies they consume.

Rating: 4.2/5 — The most humanely accessible of Faulkner’s great novels and possibly the best entry point to his work, Light in August builds one of American fiction’s most shattering arguments about race through the tragedy of a man destroyed by a category he may not even belong to.

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