Illuminating Identity

We're not reading about April anymore! I was very happy to see this shift in time, as I think it marks a major maturation in Faulkner's writing. As a Southerner, I can say that the light in August is very different from the rest of the year: it's tangible, almost dusty-feeling, but at the same time makes everything look very vivid. I can't think of a word for it, but it's like a "heavy" shimmering, if that makes any sense. I think the combination of drowsiness from the heat and the brilliance of the colors evoke a dream-like state where one could imagine anything coming up the road, from a man named "Joe Christmas" to the galloping ghost of a Confederate soldier.

I think the emphasis on light in the title is suggestive of one of the novel's major themes: identity, or the lights in which we view ourselves and others. Three of the main characters--Lena Grove, Joe Christmas, Reverend Hightower, and Byron Bunch--all exemplify the struggle to capture and identify the self.

Lena sees herself only in terms of her physical being and her concrete goals. Her existence when we meet her is simply this: she is pregnant and she is going to find Lucas Burch and marry him, even if that means walking all the way from Alabama. She alone of all the characters knows exactly what she wants and acts accordingly. The surety and peacefulness with which Lena moves makes many of the other characters (like her runaway lover and Joe Christmas), seem empty and frantic. But I wonder if Faulkner is holding Lena up as the ideal model of existence? She is destined to be thwarted in her endeavor to marry Burch, and forever blinded to any possible happiness with Byron Bunch because he is not the one she thinks she is seeking.

Joe Christmas is perhaps the least understandable yet one of the most intriguing characters of the novel. His whole existence so far has been miserably defined by external forces: race, religion, and sex. Continually faced with being "black", a "man" or a "Presbyterian", Joe finds his personhood cannot be fully illuminated by the lights in which society tries to see him. He "only wants some peace and quiet" but he has been forced out of society and his ensuing anger gives him no rest. In the end, he is killed for daring to have some African-American blood, castrated for being a man, and shot in a way reminiscent of Christ on the cross.

Reverend Hightower is, obviously, defined by the past. However, these pasts do not belong to him, they are primarily of his unstable wife and his long dead grandfather. We do not know where he comes from or why he has chosen this path, but this is actually all unimportant in understanding his character for he only understands himself in the light of history. Perhaps the present is so frightening and volatile that the past provides the only stability for life in the modern world. He is temporarily awakened from his reverie by the hapless plight of poor Lena, but the end of the novel sees him alone in Jefferson again, abandoned even by the his sole friend, Byron Bunch.

The end of the novel suggests the ultimately circular nature of time in general, as Lena finds herself still on the road, contemplating how far she is come and how much further she must go, and Hightower is still bereft of any connection to the present. This tone of inevitability suggests that people come and go, passions grow and die, but the light in August always remains the same.