The Isolation of the Individual

Light in August is filled with loners, isolated figures who choose or are forced to inhabit the fringes of society. Byron shields himself from the outside world with his unconscious strategy of detachment. Lena is an abandoned mother-to-be who, in seeking the support of Joe Brown, finds she is able to stand alone and is better off for it. She is the catalyst that facilitates Byron’s final and delayed entrance into the world of human interaction and contact. Though their vague and nontraditional family is still forming in the novel’s final chapter, they are the only characters who are able to solve the riddle of their own estrangement and loneliness.

Reverend Hightower and Joe Christmas both are described as living outside of time, inhabiting their own temporal order and a world of their own making. After the betrayal that Christmas experiences at the hands of Bobbie Allen, replicating the abandonment and neglect that marked his childhood, he lives an unfettered and rudderless existence, deliberately sabotaging any opportunity to establish an emotional tie or connection with another. His one potentially auspicious attempt at human contact—his developing relationship with Miss Burden—ends not in greater intimacy and connectedness but in murder and displaced rage.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Compound Words

Faulkner’s frequent use of compound words is emblematic of his inventive use of language, his ability to push the boundaries of articulation, and his willingness to bend and stretch diction to suit his particular aesthetic needs. The use of this device suggests that the reserve of existing English words, and the traditional means of combining, linking, and employing them, are insufficient to Faulkner’s exploration of the complex states of consciousness and knowing.

Examples abound in the novel. Lena is described as “inwardlistening,” while her pregnancy makes her “swolebellied.” Hightower’s wife is deemed “quietlooking,” and his house becomes, after her death, “mansmelling, manstale.” Faulkner employs these long neologisms—words of his own invention—as a means of accessing or enacting elusive, complex, or contradictory states that resist easy explication or are not readily translated into the realm of the written word. The combinations attempt to bridge the wide gulf between appearance and reality, conscious and unconscious thought, and internal and external states of being.

Fluid Time

Light in August is a complex mélange of events told in a dynamic clash of flashbacks and present-tense narration. The cyclical nature of Lena’s wanderings, first into and then out of town, serve as bookends for the broad scope and wide narrative net contained within. Along the way, Faulkner moves his story forward and backward in time. Various occurrences overlap and intersect; actions take place simultaneously in different parts of Jefferson and are then reported or recounted by a chorus of competing voices, each with its own subjective viewpoint. For example, the murder of Miss Burden has already occurred by the time Lena arrives at the planing mill in Chapter1, but we are not made privy to the details of the killing until the end of Chapter 12. This structure and approach underscore Faulkner’s notion that nothing happens in isolation. Rather, the various events that the novel comprises, whether past or present, are part of a far-reaching chain of causality stretching back to the Civil War and beyond. By juxtaposing multiple time periods and points of view, Faulkner achieves a complexity and resonance in step with the multidimensional world he creates.