Names and Naming

Faulkner’s deliberate selection of names for his characters adds subtle resonance to the rich portrait of intersecting lives that he presents. The reverend’s isolation from society and self-imposed exile are signaled in his surname, Hightower. Miss Burden’s family has suffered its share of personal tragedies and difficult burdens in establishing its presence in the town of Jefferson. Lena Grove is a child of nature, more at home among the trees and wild spaces than in the civilizing confines of traditional, settled society. For Joe Christmas, a name—and the personal history and sense of self it provides—is a luxury he has never been afforded. His lack of a birth name, and the lack of identity that implies, can be seen as the overarching tragedy of his life and the driving force behind the restless search that constantly goads him. Byron Bunch, on the other hand, is the beneficiary of a mistaken identity, as Lena is mistakenly led to believe that he is the Lucas Burch she seeks, likely because the two men’s surnames differ by only a single letter. Although he is not in fact Burch, it turns out the Byron is the man Lena has been unknowingly seeking all along. At the conclusion of the novel, her newborn son remains nameless, free of the strictures and expectations the act of naming can engender.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Dead Sheep

In a novel steeped in religious imagery—including hints of crucifixion and the wooden cross on which it occurred—Joe Christmas’s killing of the sheep is a brief but telling addition to this set of Christian symbols. Like many adolescents, Christmas finds the onset of his sexual urges and increasing curiosity and knowledge unsettling. When he is first acquainted with the workings of a woman’s menstrual cycle, he is sickened and repulsed by the knowledge. The only catharsis he can find is in the bloody sacrifice of a farmer’s sheep grazing in a field. The irrational and impulsive act—and almost ritualistic spilling of blood—foreshadows the two additional killings that come to haunt Joe and ultimately seal his fate. In addition, the sheep is indirectly established as a double for Christmas, the sacrificial lamb who heads willingly to the slaughter in the ways that he actively seeks his own death and destruction. The sheep’s brutal killing also anticipates the shooting and castration that awaits Joe in Reverend Hightower’s kitchen.

Smoke Rising from the Burden House

The fateful day on which Lena arrives in Jefferson is marked also by the killing of Miss Burden and the burning of her home. Up until that point, Byron Bunch had docilely pursued his ritualized and deliberately uncomplicated existence. Meeting Lena at the mill, though, as he later recounts to Hightower, he is so distracted and unsettled by her presence that he never consciously sees the plume of smoke rising on the horizon “in plain sight like it was put there to warn me.” Later, the omniscient narrator states that, when Byron realizes Lucas Burch and Joe Brown are one and the same, “[i]t seemed to him that fate, circumstance, had set a warning in the sky all day long in that pillar of yellow smoke, and he too stupid to read it.”

But Byron’s impression of the smoke as an ill omen of ill will is another example of misinterpretation in the novel. The smoke serves not as a harbinger of bad times to come but marks, rather, the ending or the passing away of an existing order. The fire at the Burden house serves as a ritualistic cleansing, releasing the tragedy and violence that has marked Jefferson that August and paving the way for Lena’s life-bearing presence and the new sense of commitment and obligation it triggers in Byron.