Analysis

Throughout Light in August, Faulkner explores the importance of memory amid the various layers of consciousness and thought that contribute to an action, motivation, or story. This approach gives us a more dynamic and complex understanding of character, gesturing to the parts of an individual that words cannot access or elucidate. For all the thoughts, impulses, and articulation that help define a person, there is always an unspoken element, the haunting record of the past that can never be expunged. Amid this seeming confusion, memory emerges as a potent and supreme form of knowledge, or personal truth. For Joe Christmas, memory consists of a painful personal history, an autobiography told not in facts and events but in an ever-present and instinctively referenced record of humiliation, abuse, and shame.

For Joe, memory is a burden that cannot be erased or escaped. No matter how far or fast he attempts to run from his past, it is always contained within him, in his conscious recollection of all that has transpired in his life and led to his fateful months residing in Jefferson. Rather than provide Joe with solid grounding from which to draw support and stability, his past is a chronicle of debasement in which he is systemically dehumanized—not only by those around him but also by his own actions. Instead of a unified and focused sense of self, Joe has a precarious lack of identity, which serves only as a backdrop for the gradual unraveling of his life. We see that Joe begins the gradual and inexorable hollowing of himself even in his formative years, and we see later see how this hollowing leads eventually to his violent rampages. With his own life and sense of self so emptied and devalued, mercilessly taking the lives of others becomes a tragic, if not inevitable, result. Ultimately, the mystery of Joe’s ambiguous identity is solved only when it is too late and no longer of any value to the troubled man.

Joe is an imprisoned subject, unable to fully embrace or embody his identity, yet unable to achieve the escape and release he desperately seeks. He longs to run away from the McEacherns but remains trapped and static. At one point, Faulkner, in one of a number of animal images associated with Joe, compares his protagonist to an eagle, “though he did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage.” Joe’s roiling and explosive anger is like that of a caged beast, pacing the borders of his imprisoned psyche, serving out a sentence both self-imposed and visited on him by a racist and dismissive society. Joe debases himself further in spurning the kindness and attention that his foster mother forces on him. After overturning the tray of food and throwing it in the corner, Joe’s hunger eventually outweighs his spite, and he is reduced to an animal, eating scraps from the floor.

Summary: Chapter 9

After a time, McEachern notices that Joe’s suit has been worn and realizes that his son is sneaking out at night. One night, he watches as Joe slithers down the rope outside his window and is picked up by a car. Hitching his team, McEachern is guided almost instinctively to the schoolhouse, where a dance is being held. He bursts in on the scene, calling Bobbie a harlot, and begins beating his son, who smashes a chair over his father’s head, killing him.

Joe rides his father’s horse back to the house, where he takes all the money his mother had been saving, hidden in a tin beneath a floor plank. Eventually abandoning the fatigued horse, Joe runs to Max and Mame’s house, where Bobbie is packed and ready to return to Memphis. Another man, a stranger, is present as well. The men ask Joe whether he thinks he has actually killed his foster father. Bobbie curses him for getting her into a potentially compromising situation and threatening Max and Mame’s prostitution business. Joe takes his mother’s money out and gives it to Bobbie as his proposal of marriage. She throws the offering back at him and calls him a “nigger son of a bitch.” The men set on him, beating him until Mame finally stops them.