Light In August Analysis

2457 Words5 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: William Faulkner Light in August

William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) is an investigation of the dilemmas of the modern Man. Faulkner examines the psychological as well as the social motives behind humans’ confused identity and weird behavior through the portrayal of his different characters in a constant search for their true selves. Alwayn Berland in his book Light in August: A Study in Black and White states that Faulkner “dealt directly with the largest human dilemma: what gives value and worth to human life? Why, and for what, do human beings strive?what is the nature of virtue? of evil? What are the limits of human freedom”. This novel, centered basically on the character of Joe Christmas, illustrates best these ideas. Joe Christmas represents the most complex character in this novel; he stands as the vehicle through which Faulkner introduces his views about human psyche and the anxieties of the modern era in the post-bellum southern society. The complexity of this character represents a source of confusion and mystery for critics because of his “confused identity, ambiguous sexuality, volatile temperament” (Walsh, 2), and often violent behavior. There were always conflicting critical views in relation to this character, when some consider him the victim of his traumatic childhood experiences and the Southern society’s cruelty; others perceive that he is the novel’s villain and the embodiment of evil. Relying on the ideas of the German psychiatrist Alice Miller, this paper aims at stressing the importance of childhood memories in defining the mystifying character of Joe Christmas as well as accounting for Faulkner’s use of such character.
Alice Miller deviates from Freud’s claims that innate evil drives represent the major causes behind humans ‘emotio...

... middle of paper ...

...eing pregnant without being married which was intolerable in a white conservative society and by examining at the same time the story of Joe Christmas who was rejected from his early childhood by these same people because they suspect he has “black blood in his veins”. The image of Joe Christmas functions as a reminder for whites of their responsibility and role as a society for the emergence of such disturbed and even criminal individuals as a result of mistreatment, brutality, physical and more importantly psychological abuse.
Light in August is a novel about human dilemmas par excellence in which Faulkner tries to account for the importance of childhood experiences in determining the character of individuals as adults. He also emphasizes the role played by society in defining the traits of it members as a result of the views and attitudes it imposes on them.

Show More
Related

  • Post- Emancipation Life in The Wife of His Youth by Charles Chesnutt

    526 Words  | 2 Pages

    Post-emancipation life was just as bad for the people of “mixed blood” because they were more black than white, but not accepted by whites. In the story those with mixed blood often grouped together in societies, in hopes to raise their social standards so that there were more opportunities for...

    Read More

  • Of Lyricism In Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric?

    1022 Words  | 3 Pages

    Ever since the abolition of slavery in the United States, America has been an ever-evolving nation, but it cannot permanently erase the imprint prejudice has left. The realities of a ‘post-race world’ include the acts of everyday racism – those off-handed remarks, glances, implied judgments –which flourish in a place where explicit acts of discrimination have been outlawed. It has become a wound that leaves a scar on every generation, where all have felt what Rankine had showcased the words in Ligon’s art, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” (53). Furthermore, her book works in constant concert with itself as seen in the setting of the drugstore as a man cuts in front of the speaker saying, “Oh my god, I didn’t see you./ You must be in a hurry, you offer./ No, no, no, I really didn’t see you” (77). Particularly troublesome to the reader, as the man’s initial alarm, containing an assumed sense of fear, immediately changing tone to overtly insistent over what should be an accidental mistake. It is in these moments that meaning becomes complex and attention is heightened, illuminating everyday prejudice. Thus, her use of the second person instigates curiosity, ultimately reaching its motive of self-reflections, when juxtaposed with the other pieces in

    Read More

  • Contrasting Lucas Beauchamp of Go Down, Moses and Joe Christmas of Light in August

    5436 Words  | 11 Pages

    Lucas Beauchamp, found in Intruder in the Dust and Go Down, Moses, is one of William Faulkner's most psychologically well-rounded characters. He is endowed with both vices and virtues; his life is dotted with failures and successes; he is a character who is able to push the boundaries that the white South has enforced upon him without falling to a tragic ending. Living in a society which believes one drop of black blood makes a person less than human and implies criminal tendencies, a society in which men like Joe Christmas are hunted and killed for fear of racial mixing, Lucas is a character who contradicts all that we have come to expect from a typical tragic character of mixed blood, such as Joe Christmas or Charles Bon. By contrasting the Lucas Beauchamp we find in the "The Fire and the Hearth" section of Go Down, Moses to a model tragic figure such as Joe Christmas from Light in August, one can measure Lucas' success by his own merit, not by his white ancestry.

    Read More

  • Solitude as Portrayed by Faulkner in Light in August

    1958 Words  | 4 Pages

    William Faulkner, an American author, wrote the novel, Light in August, in which Joe Christmas is at the center of the story. Joe Christmas is an orphan who is of biracial descent. At a young age, Christmas was adopted by a man named McEachern. When Christmas became older, he killed his father. From that point on, Christmas wandered about until he reached Jefferson, Mississippi where he fell in love with Joanna Burden, whom he also killed later on in the story. For this reason, along with numerous others, Christmas was lynched at the conclusion of this novel. William Faulkner carefully integrates several different ideas that can lead to a man’s solitude. According to the book William Faulkner by Harold Bloom, “…his fiction is steeped in the tones and emotions of the Deep South” (11). This holds true for Light in August since there is plenty of racism and hatred towards blacks. In William Faulkner’s novel, Light in August, Joe Christmas’s identity, psychological attitude, and resemblance to Christ are revealed through his isolation from society.

    Read More

  • Walter Morrison's Case Analysis

    541 Words  | 2 Pages

    This chapter discusses when Bryan met Walter McMillian, a hardworking but undereducated man who became romantically and sexually involved with a white woman, named Karen. Interracial relations were illegal all the way up to the mid-1900s, while the law attempted to justify this injustice with “separate but equal” rhetoric. Once the woman’s husband found out, the incident was taken to court where Walter was also present and thus ostracised by the community. The judge for Walter’s case even personally called Bryan and threatened him in hopes he would quit the case, however Bryan was up for the challenge, no matter how hard the judge made it for him. The woman also started using drugs, and started hanging out with a troubled man named Ralph Meyers, and were even suspected to be involved in a murder of a lower class woman named Vickie Pittman.

    Read More

  • Biological and Psychoanalytic Perspectives in Psychology

    1625 Words  | 4 Pages

    The psychoanalytic perspective grew out of subsequent psychoanalytic theories (1901, 1924, and 1940) following decades of interactions with clients with the use of an innovative procedure developed by Sigmund Freud that required lengthy verbal interactions with patients during which Freud probed deep into their lives. In a nutshell, the psychoanalytic perspective looked to explain personality, motivation, and psychological disorders by focussing on the influence of early childhood experiences, on unconscious motives and conflicts, and on the methods people use to cope with their sexual and aggressive urges. The Biological perspective on the other hand looks at the physiological bases of behaviour in humans and animals. It proposes that an organism’s functioning can be described in terms of the bodily structures and biochemical processes that cause behaviour. This paper attempts to examine the similarities and differences between the psychoanalytic perspective and the biological perspective with the key focus on the core assumptions and features of these perspectives as well as their individual strengths and weaknesses.

    Read More

  • Christian Picciolini's White American Youth

    1752 Words  | 4 Pages

    White American Youth is a gruesome story that captures the physical and psychological changes a human can unveil through the exposure of the ideals of racism, discrimination, and categorization. We will examine Christian Picciolini: as he explores the journey of his own self identity, eventually securing himself as the most powerful, violent individual in all of Blue Island. Christian finds himself falling for the persuasive ideologies of the White Supremacy movement through the connections of the individuals he meets along the way, as well as the desire for self identity, respect and admiration he hopes to seek from all who knows his name.

    Read More

  • Myths in Tom Robbins’s Another Roadside Attraction

    5355 Words  | 11 Pages

    While Robbins’s work was at first ill received, by the mid-1970s the public had started to warm up to this quirky and thought provoking writer. Even today, his work invites inquiry about what prompted him to write this controversial novel. That is, who and what influenced this line of thought? What was happening in America and with Christianity during the period, in which he wrote and researched this piece of fiction? And, finally, why did he write in this sporadic, nonlinear fashion, inserting seemingly non-related details and encrypting an official report within the structure of a novel? And how does this relate to the influences mentioned above? All of these questions and more offer themselves up from the pages of this funny and whimsical, yet philosophical and wise novel, Another Roadside Attraction.

    Read More

  • Daylight Analysis

    1490 Words  | 3 Pages

    Stella Adler, an american actress, said “The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation” (brainy quotes). Adler points out the importance of how theatre is a virtual representation of the real world and day to day situations. The message sent through theatre is absolutely amazing. World premier drama by Bruce R. Coleman, Daylight, was an outstanding play that challenges the ideas of how we get to happiness and how we become the people we were meant to be.

    Read More

  • Racial Issues in The Runaway Slave and Life of a Slave Girl

    2462 Words  | 5 Pages

    Like Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the black slave women are dehumanized by the other characters in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and Harriet A. Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself. Sexually harassed by their white masters, these slave women are forbidden to express the human emotion of love. Pressured into a shamed motherhood, they cannot love their children in the same ways that a white mother can. Moreover, slave women are treated like chattels. The black women in Browning and Jacobs’ works are oppressed sexually, forced into unwanted motherhoods, and stripped of their identities. Yet, because they face these cruelties with courage and dignity, these black slaves emerge as heroines of their own fates.

    Read More

  • The Role of a Mother in As I Lay Dying Written by William Faulkner

    1843 Words  | 4 Pages

    Palumbo, Donald. "The Concept of God in Faulkner's "Light in August," "The Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying" and "Absalom, Absalom!"" The South Central Bulletin 39.4 (1979): 142-46. JSTOR. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.

    Read More

  • Personality Psychology: Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

    854 Words  | 2 Pages

    “To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal”-William James. Waldo Emerson spoke of how the sun shines and we feel its warmth but never think to wonder why, and surprisingly when it comes to evil, pain, hunger, even unusual people, we grow more than fascinated, if not infatuated with the subject. Sometimes, we find ourselves acting as disturbed people do. Why do we do this? It could possibly be that we, too, feel this way to a lesser extent. We may have felt, through family and friends, pain that could have brought some of us to a psychological disorder like: feeling unworthy

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Light In August And Joseph In Dangling Man

    1255 Words  | 3 Pages

    Joe Christmas in “Light in August” and Joseph in “Dangling man” are both on the hunt for an identity. For different reasons and in different ways these two characters begin a quest, in which the ultimate goal is the self-determination.

    Read More

  • The Tragedy of EveryMan in Death of a Salesman

    1660 Words  | 4 Pages

    Vogel, Dan The Three Masks of American Tragedy. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press [1974]. pp. 91-102.

    Read More

  • Racism In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    1325 Words  | 3 Pages

    “In Chicago, for instance, nearly 80% of working age African American men had criminal records in 2002” says the American Prospect in “The New Jim Crow” showing that mass incarceration and unintended racism is still a theme in modern society. The American Prospect shows how the American Justice system massively prosecutes African Americans. This racism goes beyond the laws and you benefit from it even if you are not racist, showing that the African American past still haunts the present of today. In the Book Beloved by Toni Morrison the past haunts the present by the reincarnation of Sethe’s killed baby, Sethe´s and Paul D´s inability to secure their relationship and Denver not being allowed to receive a real childhood.

    Read More

More about Light In August Analysis

Open Document