Stories within a Story

By this point in the class I think a lot of us are reaching Faulkner critical mass. I believe we are the fifth full novel, and that’s quite a bit of Faulkner. That being said, I would like to note that even though I’ve read more Faulkner than I might care to have, he still surprises and challenges me. For example, most of his later works, Sound and the Fury era, seem to have the same feel about them, the same tone and setting. And while Light in August is shares this overall Faulknerian feeling, it is different in a way, as all of Faulkner’s novels are. Something that struck me as particularly interesting about Light in August was the amount of narrators the book had. Nearly all of the action of the story is revealed to the reader through the telling of stories by other characters.
Light in August is mostly narrated through the voices of the characters in the book, but in a special way. A great deal of the “action” is actually comprised of things that took place many years ago and is being retold from one character to another. The novel’s current setting spans no more than two months, beginning with Lena Grove’s trek from Alabama and ending with her and Byron Bunch’s journey out of Mississippi. All in all, though, the present setting action describes only a handful of days from these two months. Lena arrives in Jefferson on the day that Joe Christmas murders Miss Burden and burns down her house. Brown spends a few days helping the sheriff look for Christmas, Christmas spends a week on the lamb, Lena has her baby, and then the next day Christmas is caught and subsequently murdered when he attempts to escape. These events comprise nearly all of the present action.
The majority of the novel, then, is made of stories and histories told by different characters and at times an omniscient narrator. Miss Burdern tells Christmas of her family’s past--how her father was killed by Colonel Sartoris—Byron tells Hightower about the Christmas and Brown’s bootlegging outfit and how Christmas had a relationship with Miss Burder. Byron also tells Hightower about the murder of Miss Burden and about how Christmas was caught. Mrs. Hines relates to Hightower the story of her daughter and grandson, who turns out to be Christmas. Even the ending chapter is a story told by a Tennessean man to his wife. He relates the tale of how he picked up Lena Grove and Byron Bunch in Mississippi and brought them to Tennessee. All of these instances are of one character telling something to another character. The reader of Light in August is very rarely privy to firsthand accounts of the action of the novel.
The technique of using many different characters to tell a story is not unique to Faulkner or to Light in August. In fact, Faulkner is known for his use of many and varied narrators. What does this technique add to a novel, though? It distances the reader from the action for one thing, such as how the sex in Sanctuary is revealed to the reader through a character who was watching another character watch the two having sex. This technique also gives the reader several different perspective on one event, and access to information about a great deal more events, than just one single narrator could ever give.