He has been fired from his job at Doane's Mill and moved to Mississippi, promising to send word to her when he has a new job. Not hearing from Burch and harassed by her older brother for her illegitimate pregnancy, Lena walks and hitchhikes to Jefferson, Mississippi, a town in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County. There she expects to find Lucas working at another planing mill , ready to marry her.
Those who help her along her four-week trek are skeptical that Lucas Burch will be found, or that he will keep his promise when she catches up with him. When she arrives in Jefferson, Lucas is there, but he has changed his name to Joe Brown. Looking for Lucas, sweet, trusting Lena meets shy, mild-mannered Byron Bunch, who falls in love with Lena but feels honor-bound to help her find Joe Brown. Thoughtful and quietly religious, Byron is superior to Brown in every way but his shyness prevents him from revealing his feelings to Lena. The surly, psychopathic Christmas has been on the run for years, ever since presumably killing his strict Methodist adopted father.
Although he has light skin, Christmas suspects that he is of African American ancestry. Consumed with rage, he is a bitter outcast who wanders between black and white society, constantly provoking fights with blacks and whites alike. Christmas comes to Jefferson three years prior to the central events of the novel and gets a job at the mill where Byron, and later Joe Brown, works. The job at the mill is a cover for Christmas's bootlegging operation, which is illegal under Prohibition. He has a sexual relationship with Joanna Burden, an older woman who descended from a formerly powerful abolitionist family whom the town despises as carpetbaggers.
Though their relationship is passionate at first, Joanna begins menopause and turns to religion, which frustrates and angers Christmas.
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At the end of her relationship with Christmas, Joanna tries to force him, at gunpoint, to kneel and pray. Joanna is murdered soon after: The novel leaves readers uncertain whether Joe Christmas or Joe Brown is the murderer. Brown is Christmas' business partner in bootlegging and is leaving Joanna's burning house when a passing farmer stops to investigate and pull Joanna's body from the fire.
The sheriff at first suspects Joe Brown, but initiates a manhunt for Christmas after Brown claims that Christmas is black. The manhunt is fruitless until Christmas arrives undisguised in Mottstown, a neighboring town; he is on his way back to Jefferson, no longer running. In Mottstown, he is arrested and jailed, then moved to Jefferson. His grandparents arrive in town and visit Gail Hightower, the disgraced former minister of the town and friend of Byron Bunch.
Bunch tries to convince Hightower to give the imprisoned Joe Christmas an alibi, but Hightower initially refuses. Though his grandfather wants Christmas lynched, his grandmother visits him in the Jefferson jail and advises him to seek help from Hightower. As police escort him to the local court, Christmas breaks free and runs to Hightower's house.
A childishly cruel white vigilante, Percy Grimm, follows him there and, over Hightower's protest, shoots and castrates Christmas. Having redeemed himself at last, Hightower is then depicted as falling into a deathlike swoon, his whole life flashing before his eyes, including the past adventures of his Confederate grandfather, who was killed while stealing chickens from a farmer's shed.
Brown deserts Lena once again, but Byron follows him and challenges him to a fight. Brown beats the braver, smaller Bunch, then skilfully hops a moving train and disappears. At the end of the story, an anonymous man is talking to his wife about two strangers he picked up on a trip to Tennessee, recounting that the woman had a child and the man was not the father. This was Lena and Byron, who were conducting a half-hearted search for Brown, and they are eventually dropped off in Tennessee. Due to its naturalistic, violent subject matter and obsession with the ghosts of the past, Light in August is characterized as a Southern gothic novel, a genre also exemplified by the works of Faulkner's contemporary Carson McCullers , and by later Southern writers like Flannery O'Connor , and Truman Capote.
Jarraway view Faulkner's use of Southern gothic genre tropes , such as the dilapidated plantation house and the focus on mystery and horror, as self-conscious modernist commentary on man's "warped relationship with the past" [3] and the impossibility of determining true identity. According to Daniel Joseph Singal, Faulkner's literary style gradually developed from 19th century Victorian to modernist, with Light in August more firmly grounded in the tradition of the latter. The couple had two children of their own, one of whom died in infancy.
Yet the general public found his work too dark and complex.
He continued writing lucrative screenplays along with his fiction for the next few decades. While scholarly appreciation for his work remained high, by the mids, all of Faulkner's books were out of print. The publication of The Portable Faulkner in , however, which included editor Malcolm Cowley's study of Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County, sparked new and intensified interest in Faulkner, which led to his reputation in the early s as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.
Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, , in Byhalia, Mississippi. His major awards include the O. When Light in August opens, Lena Grove has been walking for four weeks from Alabama to Jefferson, farther from her home than she has ever traveled. After living in a tiny room in her brother's house in the small town of Doane's Mill for eight years after her parents died, she began to sneak out of the bedroom window at night until she found herself pregnant.
Even though Lucas Burch had left town six months before her brother found out, Lena refused to reveal his name. Deciding not to wait for him to come for her, Lena sets out to find Lucas. On the road, Mr. Armstid, a farmer, decides to bring her home for the night. She later admits to him and his wife that she is not married but makes excuses for Lucas, insisting that such a good natured fellow as he needs some time to settle down.
The next morning Armstid drives her to the town store and informs the men there that she needs a ride to Jefferson. Byron Bunch thinks about the time three years earlier when he first met Joe Christmas at the lumber mill where he works in Jefferson. Joe did not speak to anyone, and no one spoke to him for months.
Another stranger who came to the mill named Brown revealed that Joe lived in the woods on Joanna Burden's estate. After three years, Joe suddenly quits his job at the mill. Rumors circulate that he and Brown are selling whiskey and that they both are living in the cabin on Miss Burden's place. One Saturday afternoon, Byron is alone at the mill since the others have gone to watch the fire that is consuming Miss Burden's house. Lena appears looking for Burch, and Byron falls in love with her. Byron soon realizes that the man she is looking for is Brown and, in order to prevent her disappointment, provides her with only a few minor details about him.
The narrative shifts to Reverend Gail Hightower, a defrocked minister who now struggles to make a living by selling greeting cards. He had been the town's Presbyterian minister but lost his church after "his wife went bad on him. The townspeople heard rumors that there was a man in the room with her and that they both were drunk. Believing that Hightower drove his wife to commit suicide, the townspeople refused to come back to his church, so he was forced to resign. After he did not fire his housekeeper when he was warned about being alone in his home with a black woman, he was severely beaten by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Eventually, the townspeople began to ignore him and left him alone. Byron tells Hightower about Lena, whom he has just set up at the boarding house, and they wonder who started the fire at the Burden house. A man passing by saw the fire and found Brown drunk inside the house. Upstairs, he discovered Miss Burden, almost decapitated. Byron informs Hightower that Brown and Joe have been selling whiskey from her property and that Joe is part black. That night, Brown appears in town claiming Joe killed Miss Burden and demands the reward that has been promised for information about the murder.
He tells the sheriff that she and Joe had been living "like man and wife" and that Joe is of mixed race. Byron believes that Brown set the house on fire and hopes that if he gets the money, he will marry Lena. The narrative then goes back to the night before the murder, as Joe thinks about his complex and brutal two-year relationship with Joanna Burden. He is angry that she lied about her age and never told him that women can lose their sexual desire after going through menopause.
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He is also incensed that she tried to pray over him. Filled with the desire to "smell horses … because they are not women," and hearing strange voices in his head, he walks the next day to the black community on the outskirts of town and confronts some residents with a razor in his hand. Later, that night, he kills Joanna.
The narrative flashes back to when Joe was five and living in an orphanage "like a shadow … sober and quiet. As the dietician enters the room with a man, he hides behind a curtain and begins to feel ill from the toothpaste. When the couple begins to have sex, Joe throws up and so is discovered.
Over the next few days, she becomes desperate as she waits for him to tell the matron about what she was doing in the washroom. Determining that the janitor, who readers later discover is Joe's grandfather, hates Joe as well, the dietician tells him what happened. The janitor snatches him the next morning, afraid that he will be sent to a black orphanage. The police catch him, however, and bring Joe back. The woman who runs the orphanage determines that Joe needs to be placed at once and finds a farming couple, Mr.
McEachern, who agree to adopt him. McEachern, who is characterized by his cold eyes, vows to make Joe "grow up to fear God and abhor idleness and vanity. Three years later, the battle of wills between Joe and Mr. McEachern has intensified, as evinced in an incident when the latter tries to force the boy to learn his catechism. When Joe refuses, Mr. Feeling pity for the boy, Mrs. McEachern brings him a tray of food that evening but he dumps it in the corner.
An hour later, he eats the food alone in his room, "like a savage, like a dog. When Joe is fourteen, a group of friends and he gather one afternoon at a sawmill where they take sexual turns with a black girl who sits in the shadows. When it is Joe's turn, he begins to beat her and the others pull him off. At home, McEachern whips him for fighting. One night, when Joe is eighteen, he climbs out his window using a rope. He wears the new suit that he had hidden in the barn, bought with the money he gained from selling his calf.
McEachern had given the calf to Joe to teach him responsibility. Joe sneaks out that night to meet Bobbie, a waitress he met in town, and to take her to a dance at the local schoolhouse. He wishes that McEachern would try to stop him. Joe's relationship with Bobbie began a year earlier when he and his father went to the restaurant one day. Joe was immediately drawn to her, but his father determined that the place was disreputable and so never went there again.
When Joe turned eighteen, he returned with a dime in his pocket. After ordering pie and coffee, he discovers that he does not have enough to pay for both. Bobbie covers for him, insisting that she had made the mistake in the order. Out on the street, "his spirit [is] wrung with abasement and regret. Joe returns to the farm where he works hard, almost feverishly. His father notices and decides to reward him with the calf, although he insists that he probably would regret his action when Joe falls back "into sloth and idleness again.
When he tries to leave the coin for Bobbie to repay her for her kindness, the men in the restaurant make fun of him. On the street, however, Bobbie shows him her appreciation for his thoughtfulness. A week later, he meets her after climbing out of his window at night. She tells him that she is "sick," and at first, he does not understand that she is trying to explain that she is menstruating. When he finally understands, he strikes her and runs away into the woods where he vomits.
A few days later, he meets her again and drags her into the woods where they have sex. Joe soon begins to steal money from his mother that he uses to buy presents for Bobbie. One night, when they are lying together in her bed, he tells her that he thinks that he is part black, but she refuses to believe him. One night Joe catches her with another man, strikes her, and then breaks down. Bobbie tells him that she thought he knew she is a prostitute. McEachern sees Joe slip out the window the evening of the dance and follows him.
When he spots Joe dancing with Bobbie, he approaches them and demands, "away, Jezebel! After Joe crashes a chair over his head, Mr. McEachern falls unconscious to the floor. Bobbie, enraged by Mr. McEachern's words, turns on Joe, blaming him for putting her in this situation. Joe leaves for home, exalting in the thought that he has killed his stepfather, which he had sworn to do.
He takes the money Mrs. McEachern has been saving so that he can marry Bobbie. When he goes to her house, though, Bobbie is still livid, screaming at him, "Getting me into a jam, that always treated you like you were a white man. After Bobbie tells the others in the house that Joe is part black, one of the men beats him, and they all leave him there on the floor. For the next fifteen years, Joe travels across the country, working as a laborer, miner, prospector, gambler, and soldier.
After a prostitute tells him that she does not mind sleeping with blacks, he practically beats her to death. He then relocates to Chicago where he lives in a black community. At thirty-three, he ends up in Mississippi and spots Miss Burden's house. After discovering that she lives alone, one night, half starved, he breaks into her kitchen where she discovers him.
As they begin their relationship, they talk very little. Even after a year, he still feels like a robber when he comes to her at night, "to despoil her virginity each time anew. One night she opens up to him, telling him of her own mixed-race ancestors. Her brother and grandfather had been killed in town by an ex-slaveholder and a Confederate soldier over a dispute concerning black voting rights. As a result of that incident, coupled with the fact that they were from New England , the town hated her and her remaining family members, seeing them always as outsiders, or worse, carpetbaggers.
Joe responds, "Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another? Joanna's fanatically religious father told her that her brother and grandfather were "murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before" any of them was born. He insisted that blacks were "a race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race's doom and curse for its sins.
criticism dealing with Light In August | William Faulkner and his Literary Kin | LibraryThing
Soon after, Joe feels as if he is in "the second phase" of their relationship, "as though he had fallen into a sewer. He determines that he is in danger of being corrupted by her. As "if she knew somehow that time was short," she begins to talk about wanting a child and a few months later, she tells Joe that she is pregnant.
In the last phase, Joanna tells Joe that she wants him to get a degree from a black school and then to take charge of her finances. At this point, she has lost her sexual desire and so will not let him touch her. Joe stops coming to the house for a few months, and when he returns, she appears to have become an old woman. When he realizes that she is not pregnant, that she has begun menopause instead, he strikes her and tells her that she is "not any good anymore.
She pulls out a revolver, intending to shoot him and then herself, but he grabs the gun and then slices her throat. Afterwards, he escapes by stopping a car and demanding a ride. The townspeople, along with the sheriff, come out to watch the fire burn out. After seeing evidence that someone has been living in the cabin on the estate, the sheriff interviews a local black man. When the man insists that he does not know who lives there, the sheriff's deputy whips him until he admits that he has seen two white men there but does not know who they are. Another man on the scene reveals that everyone in town knows that Joe and Brown live there.
Brown soon finds the sheriff back in town and demands the thousand dollar reward for the information he has about the murder. The sheriff tells him that if he catches Joe, he can have the reward and takes him to jail "for safekeeping. That night, the boy who gave Joe a ride after the murder tells his story to the sheriff. His father wants to claim the reward. Byron discusses Lena's situation with Hightower, noting that Brown has changed his name to keep her from finding him.
Hightower says that she should go back to her people, but Byron disagrees and notes that she wants to go out to the cabin and wait for Brown. Byron knows that if he tells Brown that Lena is there, he will run. Hightower suggests that is what Byron wants Brown to do and chides him for it, insisting that the devil is influencing his behavior.
Later, Byron takes Lena out to the cabin and pitches a tent near it so he can help her when the baby comes. Hightower tries to convince him to leave, arguing that he will be sinning if he tries to interfere with Lena and Brown and claiming, "It's not fair that you should sacrifice yourself to a woman who has chosen once and now wishes to renege that choice.
God didn't intend it so when He made marriage. The sheriff discovers Lena living in the cabin on the Burden estate but decides to leave her and Byron alone, claiming, "I reckon they won't do no harm out there. Some of the church members tried to restrain him but were not successful, and the man fled.
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The next morning the sheriff arrives at the church with bloodhounds and finds an "unprintable" note addressed to him, stuck into a plank on one of the walls. Joe is able to elude the trackers and catches a ride to neighboring Mottstown.
Joe Christmas: A Critical Analysis of William Faulkner’s Protagonist in Light in August
A poor, elderly couple named Hines had lived in Mottstown for thirty years when Joe was captured there. Hines, who came to be known as Uncle Doc, was secretive, "with something in his glance coldly and violently fanatical and a little crazed," which kept people away from him. He and his wife lived off of the little money he earned, working at odd jobs in town and the food that black women would bring to them.
Every Sunday he traveled around the county, holding revival services in black churches where he would at times "with violent obscenity, preach to them humility before all skins lighter than theirs. On the afternoon that Joe is captured, Doc is in town and witnesses the frenzy surrounding the incident. At one point, when he comes face to face with Joe, Doc strikes him and rages, "Kill the bastard! Hines, who witnesses her husband's outbursts, becomes increasingly suspicious about Joe and asks her husband what he did with their daughter's baby.
She insists that she be brought to Joe so that she can get a good look at him. Hines to prevent him. Byron tells Hightower that Joe has been captured and that his grandparents have been found. Later, he brings them to see Hightower, and Mrs. Hines admits that Doc took Joe to an orphanage after he was born because their daughter was not married. She did not see Joe for the next thirty years. Hines also murdered Joe's father when he caught his daughter trying to run away with him before the baby came. He would not let his wife go for the doctor when his daughter was in labor, and as a result, she died.
Hines thinks that Joe's father was Mexican, but Hines insists that he had black blood. Hines explains that he became a janitor at the orphanage to keep an eye on Joe. Byron asks Hightower to say that Joe was with him on the night of the murder, but Hightower refuses.
The next morning, Lena's child is born, and Byron realizes that he must tell Brown. When Hightower instructs Lena to send Byron away because her child is not his, she admits that she has already refused Byron's marriage proposal and she would still do so. Byron decides that he will leave as soon as Lena and Brown reunite. He convinces the sheriff to send Brown out to the cabin without telling him that Lena is there. Brown goes, thinking that is where he will pick up his reward money. When he sees Lena, his face registers "shock, astonishment, outrage, and then downright terror.
In an effort to defend Lena's honor, Byron catches up with him and challenges him to a fight, even though he admits, "now I'm going to get the hell beat out of me. On his way back to Lena, he hears that Joe has been killed. Joe escapes and flees to Hightower's house. After knocking Hightower out with a pistol he has stolen, he crouches behind a table, waiting for the sheriff to come for him. Percy Grimm, a local, patriotic zealot, insists that it is his responsibility to preserve order and so recruits some men to go after Joe.
He finds Joe at Hightower's. Hightower tries to convince Grimm that Joe was with him the night of the murder, but Grimm refuses to listen and shoots Joe. While Joe is clinging to life, Grimm castrates him, and Joe dies. Soon after, a traveler picks up Lena, her child, and Byron, who insist that they are looking for Brown but do not seem to know or care where they are going. When Byron tries to join Lena under the blanket in the back of the truck, Lena wakes up and declares, "aint you ashamed.
At the end of the book, the two continue on as Lena expresses her amazement over how far she has traveled. Bobbie Allen, Joe's first girlfriend, is a waitress and a prostitute. She is small, "almost childlike," looking much younger than her years, which makes her seem approachable to Joe. Yet, a closer look would reveal that her size was due to "some inner corruption of the spirit itself: At first, she is patient with Joe as she gently educates him about women and sexuality.
The corruption of her spirit, however, emerges during the dance when Mr. McEachern accuses her of being a harlot. Her wounded pride causes her to lash out at Joe and to betray his trust in her and their future together. Lena stays the night in Martha Armstid's home on her way to Jefferson. Martha's appearance and the work she does in her kitchen are described as savage.
She has "a cold, harsh, irascible face," which is "like those of generals who have been defeated in battle. Her presence at the beginning of the novel illustrates the harsh reality of a woman's life in the South during the first part of the twentieth century, a reality that Lena eventually has to face. Twenty-seven-year-old Miss Atkins is the dietician at Joe's orphanage.
Willing to do anything to save her position, she turns against Joe, who she thinks saw her having sex with a man in the washroom. Her guilt and fears of retribution cloud her judgment, causing her to misread Joe's intentions. Convinced that Joe is torturing her by waiting to tell about the incident, she tries to malign him to the janitor, convinced that others are as racist as she. As a result, Joe is eventually forced to leave the orphanage. Lucas Brown, also known as Lucas Burch, is notorious for his tendency to tell stories, and so the people of Jefferson "put no more belief in what he said that he had done than in what he said his name was.
Lucas "liv[ed] on the country, like a locust," waiting to land on any opportunity that he could work to his advantage. Others knew that "he'd be bad fast enough … if he just had somebody to show him how. Unassuming Byron Bunch is "the kind of fellow you wouldn't see the first glance if he was alone by himself in the bottom of an empty concrete swimming pool. Hightower, whom he visits two or three nights a week, is his only friend in town. Lena initially mistakes Byron for Brown. The juxtaposition of the two characters in this way highlights their differences.
After Lena comes to town, Bunch proves himself to be an honest and decent man. Initially, he tries to think of ways that he can keep Lena and Brown apart, but his conscience, along with some prodding from Hightower, forces him to place Lena's needs above his own. Even though he is in love with Lena, he tries to reunite her with Brown because Brown is the father of her child. When Brown deserts her again, Byron's protective nature emerges as he demands justice for Lena and challenges Brown to a fight that he knows he will lose.
By the end of the novel, he leaves with Lena, taking an active role in plotting the direction of his life. Although Joanna Burden was born in Jefferson and has lived there all of her life, she is considered an outsider because her family came from New England during Reconstruction. Her brother and father were killed in town during an argument about voting rights for blacks, and she has continued their legacy of helping blacks, most notably through her financial support of black schools and colleges.
She remains aloof in her isolated existence on the edge of town. Her personality has a certain duality, one side feminine and "the other the mantrained muscles and the mantrained habit of thinking … [with] no feminine vacillation. Like him, she sees the black race as the white man's curse, her "burden," and so feels responsible for their welfare. The rigid strictures of her faith have caused her to repress her sexuality until Joe appears.
She then indulges in her passions with a sense of wild abandon. As Joe notes, she experiences "the abject fury of the New England glacier exposed suddenly to the fire of the New England biblical hell. In effort to absolve herself and Joe for their promiscuity, and perhaps in response to her inability to have children, she tries to kill them both.
Light in August
In the orphanage, Joe is a lonely child, shunned by the other children who think him strange and of mixed blood. Never knowing who his parents are or whether he is part black, Joe is consumed with a life-long search for a sense of identity and place but is never able to alleviate his profound sense of loneliness or self-hatred.
He continually feels as if there is a "black abyss which had been waiting, trying, for thirty years to drown him. After he leaves the orphanage, Joe is influenced by McEachern, who fills his head with visions of sin and retribution and little tolerance for the weakness of others. McEachern also passes on his sexism and his propensity for violent outbursts. McEachern tries to temper her husband's harsh treatment of Joe, but Joe rejects her offers of comfort.
His fear of becoming weak prevents him from acknowledging her kindness, "which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men. He develops a thick skin and a menacing air while living with his adoptive parents and after Bobbie's betrayal. The others at the mill notice that "he carried with him his own inescapable warning, like … a rattlesnake his rattle" and worked with a "brooding and savage steadiness.
He tries to live in both white and black worlds but is not comfortable in either. His confused sense of himself emerges in his relationships with both races, illustrated when he moves to Chicago and lives with blacks: By the end of the novel, he appears to be tired of searching; he passively commits suicide when he runs to Hightower's home and is killed, holding a gun that he never fires. Percy Grimm, born and raised in Jefferson, is a patriotic zealot, who was too young to serve in World War I and always regretted it. His guilt and his need to prove himself spur him to fight anyone he perceives shows any disloyalty toward his country.
He harbors "a sublime and implicit faith in physical courage and blind obedience," and along with his belief in the superiority of Americans, he is convinced that "the white race is superior to any and all other races. His monomaniacal beliefs cause him to think he has the right to kill Joe, but not before he castrates him. Byron insists that Lena has "eyes that a man could not have lied to if he had wanted," although Brown does so on more than one occasion. Like Byron, Lena is trusting and sympathetic.
She refuses to believe that Brown has deserted her and is willing to give him several chances to make good on his promises. She also shows a remarkable resiliency and adaptability. When she eventually recognizes that Brown will never acknowledge his responsibilities toward her and their child, she accepts Byron's offer of companionship and support and suggests that they might be able to share a future together.
Lena's experiences contrast with Joe's. In contrast to Joe's circle of violence and eventual tragic death, Lena becomes a life force in the novel through her optimism and resilience as well as through the birth of her child. She overcomes her hardships with her ability to adapt to her circumstances without regret or bitterness. McKinley Grove, Lena's brother, is a hard man whose character, "except a kind of stubborn and despairing fortitude and the bleak heritage of his bloodpride had been sweated out of him.
Fifty-two-year-old Gail Hightower was minister in one of Jefferson's principle churches. Twenty-five years ago, he was defrocked, due to a scandal involving his wife, and he has been an outcast in the town ever since. His only friend and confident is Byron. His present philosophy is that "all that any man can hope for is to be permitted to live quietly among his fellows. Hightower had failed his wife, the main "dead folk" whom Byron mentions, because of his overweening self-interest and inability to live in the present.
Like many of the main characters in the novel, Hightower was damaged by his strict religious upbringing, specifically his father's stern refusal of affection or kindness. As a result, he turned to the church and immersed himself in a fictional past with his grandfather, a Confederate raider.
His self-absorption causes him to ignore the needs of his wife who eventually, after a series of affairs, commits suicide. After the scandal forced his resignation from the ministry, Hightower is resilient and tenacious as he refuses to allow the townspeople to drive him away from his home. Yet, he becomes self-satisfied in this position, living as a martyr until Byron forces him back to the present and an involvement with humanity through a connection to Joe and Lena.
Through his relationships with them, he is able to regain a measure of pride and dignity, and he becomes a kind of moral touchstone for Byron. At the end of the book, Faulkner reveals that Eupheus Hines is Joe's grandfather and also the janitor who kidnapped him from the orphanage. The people of Mottstown, who consider him quite mad, call him Uncle Doc and determine that he has "a face which had once been either courageous or violent—either a visionary or a supreme egoist.
Another one of Yoknapatawpha County's religious fanatics, he considers his daughter to be a whore and so will not send for the doctor when she goes into labor. He also uses his beliefs to justify murder and kidnapping, insisting that Joe is God's abomination and that he, Hines, is the instrument of God's will. Hines has allowed herself to be dominated by her husband throughout their marriage, refusing even to rebel against his authority as her daughter lay dying because he would not allow a doctor to care for her during childbirth. When she discovers that Joe is her grandson, however, she defies her husband and does everything she can to prevent him from harming Joe.
Her profound grief over the loss of her daughter and her grandson causes her mind to break after the birth of Lena's child. In a delusional state, she believes that Lena's child is her own lost grandson, Joe. McEachern, Joe's stepmother, has "a beaten face" and "looked fifteen years older than the rugged and vigorous husband.
She would never openly defy her husband, but after he doles out his harsh punishment to Joe, she often tries to ease her son's suffering. Simon McEachern, Joe's adopted father, tries to justify his sexism and authoritarianism through the tenets of his faith, specifically his belief in divine retribution. Insisting his actions are the result of God's direction, he promotes a "rigid abnegation of all compromise," and so he beats Joe when he does not obey him.
McEachern is a ruthless man who has never known either pity or doubt. Grimm is the one who frees Joe of his hopeless search for identity. The following chapter deals with this search in connection with the race issue. Joe is not mainly shaped by heredity but by his environment. He never had someone who gave him a feeling of belonging. He believes that his mind is black because others believe it. He rejects everything that means a threat to his identity. William Faulkner clarifies what it means to be black. He points out all negative connotations of the term Negro in the world of white people.
He shows us that people need a scapegoat to strengthen their feeling of being superior. You dont know what you are. And more than that, you wont never know. Nevertheless, they are not worse than the harsh reality. At the age of five Joe is supposed to be adopted. His later foster parents talk to the matron of the orphanage, because they want to change his name. However, it is not solely Joe Christmas who wants to know who he is. It is the society. At the beginning of his life in Jefferson Joe is only known through rumour. No one knows where Christmas is living and what he is actually doing.
Joe is not sure about his race and confronted with a society that strictly divides people into black and white. They construct their own image of him. Jefferson society, whose member treat people in accordance with their racial background, turns Christmas into a scapegoat. He is neither black nor white. In the end people are hunting Joe like an animal.
With the help of this analysis Faulkner makes it easy to form an impression of the Jefferson society. Neither Joe himself nor the reader ever gets an answer to it. American Studies - Literature. Communications - Print Media, Press. English - Literature, Works. Politics - International Politics - Topic: Business economics - Law. Business economics - Operations Research.
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