Light In August opens with Lena Grove sitting on the side of the road, realizing that she is now farther from home than she has ever been in her life-she has walked all the way from Alabama to Mississippi in a little less than a month. When Lena was twelve, both of her parents died, and she went to live with her brother, McKinley. McKinley is twenty years older than she is and has a wife who is always pregnant. Lena takes care of all of the children for her sister-in-law because she is too busy having more to do it herself. When Lena is twenty, she starts sneaking out at night to meet a man, but after doing this only about a dozen times she discovers that she is pregnant. Her brother does not realize her situation until she is already six months along and the father of the baby, Lucas Burch, is long gone. McKinley calls her a whore, but Lena believes that Lucas will send for her as he promised, so that they can get married before it is "too late." One night, realizing that she is running out of time, she decides to sneak out and find Lucas herself. She just walking, inquiring in every town she passes whether anyone has heard of Lucas Burch.

Armstid and Winterbottom, discussing a deal for a cultivator, see Lena Grove walking by and speculate on her condition. Winterbottom will not accept Armstid's offer for his cultivator, so Armstid leaves on his wagon. He passes Lena sitting in a ditch by the side of the road, and offers her a ride. He takes her to his house and offers to let her stay the night, because she is still far from town. Armstid's wife, Martha, shows contempt for Lena's naive belief that Lucas is planning to marry her, but she gives Lena all of her personal savings to help her on her way.

At Varner's store, all of the men watch Lena. They assume that she is worried about her situation and angry at Lucas Burch for having deserted her. In reality, she is trying to decide whether to buy a can of sardines with some of the money from Martha Armstid, as well as priding herself on having "et" so lady-like at the Armstid's that morning. She decides to buy the sardines, and when she is done there is a wagon waiting to give her a ride into Jefferson. When they arrive in Jefferson, they see that a house is burning.

Byron Bunch remembers the time three years ago when a young stranger, dressed well but with an air of homelessness about him, came to the planing mill looking for a job. The men at the mill find his expression of cold contempt offensive, and they are surprised when the superintendent tells them that he has given him a job. The foreman tells them that the stranger's name is Christmas, and they all assume he is a foreigner, believing that explains his clothing, which is inappropriate for mill work. Byron sees Christmas hanging around after the normal Saturday shift is over, and realizes that Christmas wears his Sunday clothes to work and doesn't eat anything because he has no money. Byron offers Christmas some of his lunch, but Christmas refuses. After earning some money he starts to wear more appropriate clothes, but he still never talks to anyone at the mill for the first six months that he works there, and he keeps the look of contempt on his face.

The men eventually learn from another stranger who comes to the mill to work, Brown, that Christmas sells whiskey illegally, and just uses the mill job as a cover. They also learn from Brown that Christmas lives in the woods behind an old colonial plantation house where a middle-aged spinster, Joanna Burden, lives alone. Brown comes to the mill looking for work about two and a half years after Christmas's arrival. He is young and tall, and the men at the mill consider him worthless, sharing a feeling that he is lying about his past and his name. Brown gambles every Saturday, and most weeks loses his paycheck. Christmas and Brown work together; Christmas is always silent, and Brown is always telling stories and flinging his shovel around without accomplishing anything. They are seen together in town sometimes on Saturdays, with Brown always acting ostentatious.

One day, Christmas quits the mill job without warning. The men tell Byron that they saw Brown and Christmas driving around in a car, so clearly Christmas has made enough money from his bootlegging-which Brown helps him with-that he doesn't need to work in a planing mill anymore. The men predict that Brown will soon be gone too, and the next day they are proven right-he only comes back once more, to pick up his paycheck.

From that day on they always see Brown in town in his car, not making a very good job of hiding his illegal activities. No one is completely sure whether or not Christmas is helping him, but they do know that Brown is too stupid to act on his own. They know that both Brown and Christmas are living on the shed on the Burden property, but they don't know if Joanna Burden is aware of this-and nobody plans to tell her.

On the Saturday afternoon of Lena Grove's arrival, Byron is working alone at the mill, and the whole town has gone to watch Joanna Burden's house burn down. While he is there, Lena Grove comes to the mill looking for Lucas Burch, but finds only Byron, and so believes she has made a mistake. She sits down to rest and tells Byron the whole story. Christmas and Brown come up in conversation, and Lena starts to ask questions about Brown. Only after Byron has said more than he should have does he realize that Joe Brown is actually Lucas Burch, and by then Lena has already figured it out.

Analysis

The first two chapters of Light In August introduce the theme of perception that predominates throughout the novel. The idea of perception and knowledge itself is already seriously complicated by the end of these chapters. Lena is often depicted seeing without looking: she is able to understand a scene completely with barely a glance, and yet she is completely blind to the reality of her situation and the pity that everyone who meets her feels for her.

The reader is introduced to Joe Christmas in the second chapter, and again is baffled by the problems of perception. Joe Christmas becomes the pivotal character of the novel, and yet in the first chapter where he appears, he is described only through the eyes of his coworkers at the mill and the rumors that are spread amongst the townspeople. Christmas is an enigma throughout the novel, but in his first appearances he is even more so, and the novel shows us how even in ignorance of any facts the town starts to build a communal understanding (or misunderstanding) of Christmas.

Byron Bunch and Reverend Hightower are also both introduced as mysterious figures in Jefferson, but to different ends. Hightower, hidden away in a house that he rarely leaves, is trapped by the town's perceptions and misperceptions of his character. Byron is similarly unknown to the town-the narrator explains that only Hightower knows where Byron goes every weekend, and nobody knows why he works every Saturday afternoon. And yet the town's lack of understanding of Byron does not confine him, but instead allows him to move about unnoticed; rather than being pigeonholed incorrectly, he is pigeonholed as a mystery, and thus anything he does can be attributed to his enigmatic persona.

The importance of names also comes up in the opening of the novel. Lena's journey to Jefferson is based on the similarity of the names Bunch and Burch; Joe Christmas is assumed to be a foreigner because of his unusual last name; Byron can't decide whether Joe Brown is an alias or not, because the name seems fake but also fits Burch's personality perfectly. The characters' names symbolize the community's perception of them, and thus the importance of names in the first two chapters predicts the deep significance that the communal perspective will have on all of the main characters.

These opening chapters also hint at the unreliability of the narration. The narrator highlights how untrustworthy each of the characters' own perceptions are by contrasting them with each other, and with the so-called reality. Yet the narrator himself often uses uncertain phrasing that makes it clear that he is not wholly omniscient, or that if he is, he chooses to hide the complete truth from the reader. The narrator also contradicts his own perceptions as he switches between different focalized perspectives, thereby drawing attention to the unreliability of all perception.

Seven years earlier, when Byron arrives in Jefferson, he asks about the mysterious Reverend Hightower. He learns that Hightower came straight from the seminary to Jefferson with his young wife-he had been obsessed with the town of Jefferson, and so refused to accept any other calling. The elders of the church in Jefferson were quickly disillusioned with Hightower because he never gave any indication that he was at all interested in the church or the people, but only in the town itself. He was deeply obsessed with his grandfather, who had been killed during the Civil War in Jefferson, to the point that his sermons barely made sense and bordered on sacrilegious because they were so infused with battles and galloping horses.

After a year, Hightower's wife stops going to church and rarely shows her face in town. The townspeople get suspicious, and one day when she is supposed to be visiting relatives out of town she is seen in a hotel in Memphis. As she disappears more and more often and comes to church less and less, the townspeople all come to realize that she is probably living in sin, but nobody says it aloud, and nobody knows whether Hightower knows or not. Hightower's wife ultimately has a breakdown and is confined to a sanatorium for a while, which is paid for by the church elders. When Hightower's wife returns from the sanatorium she seems healed, and everyone almost believes that things will be normal. However, she soon starts disappearing to Memphis again. One day she is found dead there, having jumped or fallen out of the window of a hotel room where she was staying with a man. All of Jefferson is scandalized, and after a great deal of public shaming, Hightower is forced to leave the church. They cannot, however, make him leave the town, and so he stays even though he is completely shunned, and once even physically attacked.

The weekend of Lena's arrival, Byron goes to see Hightower on Sunday night. Hightower is surprised because Byron is always away on Sundays. Byron tells Hightower about meeting Lena and accidentally revealing to her that Joe Brown is both a bootlegger and Lucas Burch. Lena wants to go to the fire, where she expects to find Lucas, but Byron convinces her to wait until evening, and takes her to get a room at Mrs. Beard's boarding house. On their way, many people try to tell him gossip about the fire, but he is afraid of what they will say and afraid of having Lena hear it, so he ignores them. Byron eventually finds out what happened, but by the time he comes to see Hightower, Hightower still doesn't know, so Byron has to be the one to tell him. Byron explains that the first man to find the house on fire found Brown inside, very drunk. Brown tried to prevent the man from going upstairs, but the man became suspicious and wanted to make sure everyone got out of the house alright, so he went up, where he found Joanna Burden's body. She was dead, her head barely attached to her body. He carried her body down and out of the fire carefully to preserve the evidence of murder. The police notified Joanna Burden's nephew from the north, who offered a one thousand dollar reward for the capture of his aunt's murderer.

Joe Christmas and Joe Brown both disappeared after the fire, but once word of the reward gets out, Brown goes to the Jefferson police to tell them that Christmas murdered Joanna Burden. He explains that Christmas and Joanna had been having a secret relationship, and that it was Joanna that bought Christmas the car that Brown used. Brown goes on and on, trying to prove Christmas's guilt and clear himself, desperate for the reward. When he realizes that the police suspect him more than they suspect Christmas, he decides to tell them that Christmas is black. Once he has convinced them that Christmas does indeed have African-American ancestors, the revelation has the desired effect: the police believe that Christmas is the murderer-but they keep Brown in jail, just in case.

One night, Brown wakes Christmas up coming in drunk, and Christmas beats him until he is quiet. Christmas can't fall back asleep, and is thrown into a rage thinking about the fact that Joanna has started praying over him. He goes to sleep in the barn to avoid Brown's snores and to be near the smell of horses, and he sleeps until dawn. When he wakes up he goes to shave, buys a magazine, and empties out his store of whiskey before going to town to get dinner. At nine he sees Brown out as usual, but as soon as he sees him he turns away and wanders around, ending up in Freedman Town. He suddenly panics, and runs until he is in a white section of town again. Eventually he goes back to Joanna's house.

Analysis

This section of Light In August describes more fully characters that were wholly mysterious in the first two chapters. Reverend Hightower is especially brought to life-and yet still only through the perspectives of others. The entire story of Hightower's tragedy and shame is told from the perspective of the townspeople, who told the story to Byron Bunch when he first moved to Jefferson. And yet the narrator blends this perspective into his own so that the reader often forgets that the perspective they are experiencing is not the narrator's. This underscores the ability of a community's accepted truths to become its reality.

Joe Christmas also starts to emerge more clearly in this section, and so too does the book's complex understanding of race and racial identity. Just as the characters' names are essential parts of their identities from the perspective of the town, race is an essential component of their beings. According to a Jefferson police officer, to accuse a white man of being black is unforgivable, even if that man is a murderer. Similarly, as soon as Joe Brown has convinced the police that Joe Christmas is black, they accept Christmas's guilt-without any more evidence than Brown's word.

Thus race fits into the town's understanding of good and evil, moral and immoral, guilt and innocence, as if on a set line: to be black is worse than to be a murderer, and to be black is to be guilty. That Joe Christmas is profoundly affected by this communal understanding of race does not become fully clear in this section of the novel, but there are hints that questions of race are at the root of his irrational anger. His journey through the black and white sections of Jefferson especially underscores this.

It also starts to become clear that Christmas is profoundly misogynistic-he sleeps in the stable because horses have a smell that is "non-woman," and his murderous hatred for Joanna is rooted in her femininity. That his obsessions with race and with misogyny are closely connected can be seen in the episode where a car of white people drives by, and the women shriek at the sight of his naked body. He is filled with rage, but finds vengeance in the fact that he has slept with white women-to him, that is more an act of racial assertion and vengeance than of sexual desire.

This section of Light In August also develops the meta-narrative aspect of the book. In chapter five, Christmas reads a magazine so closely that the words lose their meaning and hold him captive, removing him from time. In addition, the structure of the novel, with its complete disregard for chronology and multiple protagonists, presents an idea of a novel as an organic story that relies not on time, but on connecting moments and interweaving characters.

A five-year old John Christmas sneaks into the dietitian's room at his orphanage to eat some of her delicious-tasting toothpaste. He hears someone coming, and so he hides behind a curtain in the corner of the room. It is the dietitian and one of the interns from the hospital having a tryst. While Christmas waits for them to leave so that he can escape, he eats so much toothpaste that he makes himself sick. When he vomits, the dietitian, Miss Atkins, discovers him. Because she is so afraid of being caught, she begins to hate him and the threat he represents to her. Miss Atkins lives in a state of total anxiety for the next few days, believing that Christmas not only understood what he witnessed, but that he is intentionally delaying telling on her to punish her even more. She tries to bribe him to keep him quiet, but he is waiting for her to punish him for eating her toothpaste, so he does not understand and does not accept. She believes that this means he insists on telling on her. Miss Atkins approaches the orphanage's janitor, whom she has noticed watching Christmas with a deep hatred, to see if he will verify her belief that Christmas is part black. He does, but he will do nothing about it.

The next day Christmas and the janitor are both missing. They find them three days later, when the janitor tries to have Christmas put in a different orphanage where no one will know he is part black. While they are gone the dietitian tells the matron the reason for their disappearance, knowing that once Christmas is returned he will be placed in a home rather than be transferred to the black orphanage.

When the janitor takes Christmas away, the young boy passively accepts everything that happens. At first he does not know who has him, but when the janitor speaks he immediately recognizes him as the man who has been watching him obsessively ever since he can remember. They take a train to another orphanage, which Christmas again accepts without much wonder. Soon enough, the police come and get him to take him back. After his return, Christmas is taken to the matron's office, where there is a hard-looking man waiting to adopt him. This man, McEachern, takes Christmas home with him after inspecting him.

The next chapter opens with McEachern trying to teach Christmas, now eight years old, his catechism, but Christmas sits stubbornly, refusing to learn. McEachern takes Christmas to the stable, where he beats him and then gives him another hour to learn the catechism, but Christmas doesn't even try. Christmas, having had nothing to eat all morning, eventually faints, and does not wake up until later in the day. When McEachern finally leaves in the evening to go to church, Mrs. McEachern brings Christmas a tray of food. Christmas turns the tray over on the floor while Mrs. McEachern watches, and only after she is gone does he kneel down and eat the food off the floor.

At fourteen, Christmas goes with five friends to sleep with a black prostitute in a shed. When it is Christmas's turn he enters the shed, but the smell of the woman oppresses him, and he starts to kick and beat her viciously. When she starts to scream his friends run in and try to pull him off her, but he ends up fighting them just as brutally. They eventually run away from him, and he returns home to receive his usual beating from McEachern.

When Christmas is eighteen, McEachern finds a new suit hidden away, and then notices that Christmas's heifer is missing. McEachern gave the cow to Christmas to teach him the responsibility of ownership, but he realizes that as Christmas's property, it was his right to sell it. He is, however, disgusted that Christmas sold it to buy a new suit, which according to McEachern can only be used for lechery, and so he beats him.

From the time of Christmas's adoption Mrs. McEachern always tries to treat him well, but Christmas is so unused to kindness that he does not trust or understand it, instead finding it disconcerting. When she tries to defend Christmas to McEachern, he finds that it takes away the impersonal quality of the beating that makes it bearable, and so he resents all her kindnesses. He expects and is used to hard work and physical punishment and so accepts them, but he despises the unpredictability of Mrs. McEachern's kindness.

Analysis

Chapters six and seven of Light In August go back in time to tell the story of Joe Christmas's childhood. In doing so, Faulkner continues to complicate the book's understanding of the possibility of truly knowing a human being's character. Until this section, Joe Christmas has been positioned as a deeply enigmatic character, seen only through the eyes of the townspeople. These two chapters give the reader a much closer and more personal view of Christmas, and yet even this knowledge does not make him any more understandable.

The two factors of his character that emerge most in these chapters are his hatred of women and anything feminine, and his obsession with his belief that he is black. In the first scene the narrator presents of Christmas's childhood, sexual intercourse and vomiting are closely tied. This link will reemerge later in the novel, but it is also significant that Christmas is surrounded by the "womansmell" of Miss Atkins's cloths when he becomes ill. For years afterwards, he continues to associate the dietitian and her femininity with a profound sickness.

Christmas's misunderstanding of Mrs. McEachern's attempted kindness also underscores his misogyny. He refuses to accept food from her, and he finds her attempts to placate Mr. McEachern only make his punishments harder to bear. When he first arrives at the McEacherns' farm, he is utterly confused by Mrs. McEachern's kindnesses, imagining that every nice thing she does must soon be followed by something unpleasant. He finds the behavior of women too unpredictable, and impossible to respond to with the stubborn strength that he employs with McEachern.

The scene with the prostitute highlights both Christmas's hatred of women and his obsession with his perceived blackness. When Christmas enters the shed to have intercourse with the prostitute, he is overwhelmed by the smell of the "womanshenegro." It is simultaneously her gender, her sexuality and her race that fill him with the urge to beat her-which he does, and yet even he cannot truly say why, thus underscoring the final impossibility of truly understanding any character in Light In August.

Christmas is clearly obsessed with his race-an especially striking fact given that he does not actually have any evidence of his background. Other children in the orphanage use racial slurs against him, yet of the adults only the janitor and the dietitian suspect that he is not white; the McEacherns have no idea. The fact that Christmas considers telling Mrs. McEachern what he considers the secret of his true race is surprising, for he has no rational reason to believe it is true.

Christmas prepares to sneak out of the McEacherns' house, and realizes that Mr. McEachern has found his secret new suit. He puts it on and goes down the road to meet a car. When Christmas goes into town with Mr. McEachern, who must meet his lawyer, he first meets Bobbie, the woman he is sneaking out to see. The meeting takes longer than expected, and so McEachern and Christmas must get lunch in town. McEachern's stinginess leads them to a small and dingy-looking restaurant, where Christmas falls for their waitress Bobbie, even though he expects never to see her again.

Six months later, McEachern goes back into town to see his lawyer and again brings Christmas, this time giving him a dime to spend while McEachern is in the meeting. Christmas goes immediately back to Bobbie's restaurant. He orders coffee and pie, not realizing that he does not have enough money to pay for them both until Bobbie has already served him. She understands and takes the coffee back, but her boss notices and berates her. Christmas is so ashamed that he avoids going back to town for months, instead working hard on McEachern's farm. McEachern notices, and as a reward gives him the heifer that he later sells for spending money to use on Bobbie. The next week Christmas goes back to town for the first time with a half dollar that Mrs. McEachern gave him. He goes to the restaurant to try to repay Bobbie for the coffee, but she is not there and the owner laughs at him. He runs into her outside, and she is thankful. They agree to meet a few days later, and Christmas sneaks out and runs the whole five miles to town to meet her. When she arrives, she tries to tell him without saying it explicitly that she can't sleep with him because she is menstruating. He does not catch on because he is a virgin. She eventually realizes this and explains her situation to him. In response, he strikes her and walks quickly away. Christmas starts regularly sneaking out to see Bobbie and stealing money from Mrs. McEachern's secret stash to buy her things.

Max complains to Bobbie that she is spending so much time with someone so poor, but Bobbie says that she is doing it on her own time, she likes him, and he pays her anyway, although both Max and Mame know that if he is paying her it must only be small change. One night after sleeping together Christmas tells Bobbie that he believes he is part black, but she tells him he is lying, and he does not force the issue. Christmas doesn't know that Bobbie is a prostitute, and he believes that he is the only man who has ever been to her room with her. When he walks to her house one night and realizes that there is a man in her room with her, he leaves and does not come back for two weeks. Upon his return, he hits her. After that, Bobbie explains to Christmas that she is a prostitute, telling him that she thought he already knew. He starts smoking and drinking regularly, hanging out at the restaurant with Max, Mame, and the other customers. He even takes Bobbie to country dances, a fact that he is careful to keep hidden from McEachern. During the day he still manages to work hard enough to keep McEachern as satisfied as possible.

McEachern eventually figures out that Christmas has been wearing the suit that he bought secretly. He knows he must be wearing it at night for lecherous purposes. As he contemplates this he sees Christmas slip down his rope past his window, and follows him outside. With seeming clairvoyance McEachern, now on his horse, knows exactly where to go to find Christmas. He enters the school to find a dance underway and goes straight to Christmas and Bobbie, shouting at Bobbie to get away from his son. He starts to attack Christmas, who smashes a chair over McEachern's head, killing him.

Bobbie starts screaming and runs to her car, beating Christmas when he approaches her. Christmas does not seem to notice, telling her that he will meet her later. He goes to the horse that McEachern left outside. He stops at the house to take the rest of Mrs. McEachern's money, and then rides the horse towards town until it becomes so exhausted that it refuses to go on. He runs the rest of the way to Max and Mame's house, where he finds Bobbie in her room with a stranger. He shows her the money he has brought for them to escape with, but she attacks him, incensed that he has gotten her into such a dire situation. Christmas does not seem to understand anything that is happening. The stranger knocks him down and punches him a few times. Finally, the stranger and Bobbie leave to go back to Memphis, leaving Christmas lying on the floor, conscious but unmoving.

Analysis

The eighth and ninth chapters of Light In August develop more fully the theme of the connections between sexuality, race, and violence that defines Joe Christmas's life. In these chapters Christmas finally loses his virginity, and he also commits his first murder. These two firsts are not unconnected. Christmas himself claims to have killed McEachern for Bobbie, which is probably true considering that until that fatal moment, Christmas had always accepted beatings from McEachern; it is only when Bobbie becomes involved that Christmas's rage becomes murderous. Christmas's violence, however, is not used solely to protect Bobbie. He uses violence against her multiple times, first as a reaction to her explanation of menstruation, and then later when he realizes he is not her only lover. His feelings for her are complex and contradictory. He is disgusted by the idea of menstruation, picturing a beautiful urn corrupted by a vile dark liquid. This speaks to his inherent desire to see women as pure, even though he wants to have intercourse with them.

His violence towards the first prostitute also shows his inherent distaste for sexualized women. This issue becomes more complicated with the arrival of Bobbie, upon whom he projects a false purity, and yet from whose impurity he benefits. The difference between Christmas's reactions to these two prostitutes also exemplifies the importance of race in these chapters. He beats the black prostitute brutally, while his violence against Bobbie is far more subdued, and is always removed from their sexual encounters. With the first prostitute he essentially uses violence to replace sex, while with Bobbie violence is only an adjunct to their sexual relationship. These varying uses of violence with prostitutes of different races seem to highlight Christmas's own feeling that his blackness deserves punishment. His need to tell others that he is black when even he does not know that it is true arises again in these two chapters, when he tells Bobbie that he is black. His desire to proclaim his racial identity shows how conflicted he is about it himself. He tells Bobbie that he is black in a boastful way, and yet it is as if he is seeking punishment for this fact. He seems both proud and ashamed of his racial makeup...but most of all deeply confused.

These chapters also take a critical look at fundamentalist religions. McEachern, although a murder victim, is not at all a sympathetic character. Faulkner derides his fundamental Presbyterianism, creating a character who has sapped all of the life energy out of his wife and has beaten his adopted son into a hard murderer. The narrator seems most disgusted with McEachern's absolute certainty about his own moral righteousness, and makes even a misogynistic murderer like Christmas somehow sympathetic.

Everybody leaves Max and Mame's house except for Christmas, who is still lying on the floor. He eventually manages to get up and get out of the house, and for the next fifteen years he essentially lives on the road, going from city to city, and finally ending up in Jefferson, Mississippi. While on the road he works many different jobs and sleeps with many different prostitutes, often telling them that he is black so that they will kick him out without asking him to pay. One time when he attempts this in a city farther north, the prostitute does not care, and he is so disgusted by the idea that a white woman would sleep with a black man that he beats her almost to death.

For two years after the incident with the white prostitute he is driven crazy by it, intentionally goading white men into beating him up for his race. He goes to live among the black population of Chicago and Detroit, shunning white people. He keeps moving, never able to remain in one place for long, until eventually he arrives in Jefferson. He finds Joanna Burden's house, watches it until the lights go out, and then sneaks inside to try to steal some food. He finds peas in the kitchen, but Joanna comes down and finds him while he is chewing away. Thus begins the relationship between Christmas and Joanna. They talk little, and often act like they are strangers even after they have started sleeping together. She makes him food regularly, but never stays in the kitchen while he eats it. He keeps living in the cabin on her property, but she leaves the back door open at all times so that he can enter and come to her bedroom whenever he likes. One night Christmas expects Joanna to have locked him out, but when he tries the door he finds it open. He goes into the kitchen and finds a meal that Joanna laid out for him. He slowly and methodically smashes it against the wall.

After the incident with Joanna he starts to work at the mill, and does not go back to the house for six months. When he finally returns, he finds Joanna sitting on his cot waiting for him, and she tells him her life story. Her grandfather, Calvin Burden, tried to teach his children to hate hell and slavery. Her father Nathaniel Burden ran away from home at fourteen, fell in love with a Spanish woman, and finally came back home with a twelve-year old son, also named Calvin Burden. Calvin was Joanna's half-brother who was killed fourteen years before she was even born, when he was twenty, because he believed black people should have the right to vote.

After his wife, father and son have died, Calvin sends for a new wife from New Hampshire. Joanna's mother travels to Jefferson, and the two marry on the day of her arrival. Joanna is born two years later. All that Joanna remembers of her father is the burden he gave her of believing that every white man is doomed by the curse that God put on the black man. After Joanna tells all of this to Christmas, he tells her again that he knows nothing about his parents except that he is part black. She asks how he can know this, and he says that he doesn't, suddenly realizing that he has lived his whole life based only on an unproven assumption.

After this the relationship enters a new phase, with Christmas working at the mill and Joanna meeting with the black people she helps during the day. Each night Christmas eats the meals Joanna prepares for him by himself before going to bed with her. Joanna becomes more and more wild in bed, and in Christmas's eyes becomes more and more corrupt, although it is not he who is corrupting her. He watches the struggle of the two Joannas-one calm, religious and man-like, the other passionate, jealous and depraved-and sees that he should leave, but somehow he cannot bring himself to do so.

During this time Christmas starts to sell whiskey on Joanna's property, but discretely and without telling her-more out of the need to conceal something than for fear of her disapproval. Joanna starts to suffer bouts of insomnia because she senses that she will soon be saved, but that does not calm her, as she wants to continue in her depravity. Joanna starts to talk to Christmas about having a baby, but he has no interest in giving up his freedom. A few months later she tells him that she is pregnant. Christmas believes she is lying until he sees her face.

Christmas plans to run away, but again he finds himself putting off his exit and avoiding Joanna for months. She finally leaves a note for him to come see her, and when he does she refuses to sleep with him and does not mention the baby, but instead tells him that she wants him to take over all of her work, and that she will act as his assistant. He avoids her again for months, during which time he starts working with Joe Brown, and invites him to live in the cabin with him. One night Joanna finally leaves another note for Christmas, and when Christmas goes to the house Brown follows him. Christmas strikes him a few times, and Brown runs away.

When Christmas goes up to Joanna's room, she tells him she wants him to go to a black college, and then to learn law from her black lawyer, so that he will be able to handle her money and her affairs. In his anger, Christmas suddenly sees how old Joanna is; he realizes that she was never pregnant, but actually has gone through menopause. The next time she orders him to come she gives up on sending him to college, but has gone into a religious frenzy and tries to save his soul. When it becomes clear that he refuses to be saved and will not even kneel with Joanna while she prays, she decides that they must die together. The next night when Christmas goes to her room, he brings a razor to kill her, but when he refuses to pray she draws a gun. When she pulls the trigger, the chamber does not explode, and so he kills her with his razor.

Analysis

This section of Light In August complicates many of the previously established themes in its layered depiction of Christmas's relationship with Joanna Burden. Up to this point in the novel Christmas has exhibited violence against women multiple times, and this culminates in his murder of Joanna. And yet the causes of her death are far more complicated than Christmas's misogyny. First of all, her murder is not committed with the same blind, inexplicable rage that usually comprises his violence, especially against prostitutes. Secondly, Joanna is only partially a feminine figure.

During the second phase of their relationship, Joanna is depicted as having two wholly distinct parts. One part is her public persona: she is a middle-aged single woman who has lived in deep seclusion for almost all of her life, with the exception of the black people whom she takes care of, and who care for her in return. This half of Joanna is presented as completely independent, calm, and unemotional, and thus rather male. The narrator in fact repeatedly uses male adjectives to describe her, often distinguishing between Joanna and any other woman Christmas has ever known. The other half of Joanna is her "night" personality-wild, lustful, conniving, and, according to Christmas, very feminine. Christmas's perception of and reaction to these two personalities only increases the ambiguity of the gender roles in the novel. At times he seems disgusted by the feminine side, and yet he also seems mystified and somewhat threatened by the male side. What does say a lot about Christmas's understanding of gender is the fact that he so linearly connects the two aspects of her personality with male and female.

The question of race further complicates the relationship between Christmas and Joanna. Joanna is not disgusted by the secret of Christmas's race as Bobbie is, nor is Christmas disgusted by her lack of disgust, as he was with the prostitute that he almost beat to death. Yet Christmas does seem put off by any attempt Joanna makes to better his situation or take care of him, seeing these efforts not as kindness, but as displays of condescension. And in fact it is hard to know whether that is the case or not, as the aptly-named Joanna Burden is obsessed with the South's burden of a violent racial history.

Her father told her that the black man is the white man's doom, and that no one can escape it. Her belief in this clearly dictates the way she lives her life, and thus may be closely tied to her relationship to Christmas. It is not surprising that Christmas's belief that this is the case ultimately pushes him to kill her, since he is dangerously obsessed with his own race and the effect it has on his relationships. What is surprising is that he remains in the relationship with her for so long. It is really the relationship itself, and not its violent end, that complicates the issues of race and gender in the novel.

Soon after the fire at Joanna Burden's house is discovered, the whole town gathers to watch it burn-including the firemen, who cannot do anything to stop it. The policemen find evidence that someone has been living in the cabin, and upon hearing that, the man who discovered the fire remembers that there had been someone inside who had tried to prevent him from going upstairs. The sheriff picks a random black person out of the crowd to question about who lives in the cabin. After being whipped twice, the man tells the sheriff everything he knows: that the residents are two white men whom he has never seen. A different witness confirms that the men are Christmas and Brown.

After getting this information the sheriff and his men leave the scene of the fire. The whole town follows them, feeling there is nothing left to see. Back in town, the sheriff notifies Joanna's nephew in New Hampshire of her death. The nephew offers a generous reward for the capture of Joanna's murderer. News of the reward spreads quickly through the town, and that night Lucas Burch shows up at the sheriff's office. Lucas starts talking immediately, desperate for the reward. The sheriff tells Lucas that he will get the reward if he catches the murderer, but they decide to keep him in the jail for safekeeping. The next morning they continue the investigation. The young man who picked Christmas up as a hitchhiker the night of the murder comes forward to tell the police what he knows, and shows them the place where Christmas got out of his car. The Jefferson police take borrowed bloodhounds to the place, and the dogs lead them to the gun that Christmas ditched. After that the dogs' ineptitude forces them to camp for the night.

Byron goes to see Reverend Hightower to tell him that he is looking for another place for Lena to stay, so that she will not have to give birth in a boarding house full of men. Hightower thinks that Lena needs to go back to her people, but Byron claims that will not be necessary. Burch still does not know that Lena is in town, because he is too busy trying to get the reward for Christmas's capture. Lena wants to wait for Burch, whom she believes is away on business, in his cabin on the Burden property. Hightower is worried, because it is clear to him that Byron is in love with Lena and is committing sins for the first time because of that love.

Hightower goes into town to do his shopping, and hears from the proprietor that Christmas has been found. He has not yet been caught, but the dogs have picked up his trail just outside of Jefferson. Byron comes to see Hightower again, and even as he approaches Hightower can tell that Byron has changed in some way, has taken action. Slowly and guiltily, Byron tells Hightower that he moved Lena into the cabin, and that he has moved out there to be near her. He is quick to explain that he is not living in the cabin also, but in a tent nearby. Hightower tells Byron to leave Jefferson immediately, because he knows that if he stays he will end up marrying Lena, since he would not be content to live in sin with her. Hightower wants Byron to have at least the chance to marry a virgin, someone who has not already chosen someone else, and so he tells him to go. Byron will not tell Hightower he is wrong, but he will not follow his advice either, so he leaves for the long walk back to his tent by the cabin.

The Deputy finds Lena living in the cabin, so Byron tells him the whole story. The Deputy repeats the tale to the sheriff, who decides to just let her be. A man comes to the sheriff's office from a black church that has just had a major disturbance. Christmas walked into the church in the middle of their service, hitting or shoving anyone who got in his way, including the preacher, and then got into the pulpit and cursed God before using a bench to destroy as much of the church as he could. After the man who brought the message left the church, Christmas fractured the skull of a young man who was trying to attack him and then disappeared. The next morning the police bring the hounds to the church, and they immediately pick up the trail. The trail leads them right to a small cabin, but when they break in they find a woman who had switched shoes with Christmas, and realize that they have completely lost his trail.

As Christmas flees from the police, he imagines himself being chased by white men into the blackness that they have been trying to force him into his whole life. He starts to lose track of time and does not eat for days, but when he smells food in a house nearby, he asks not for food but only inquires as to what day of the week it is. At first he is hungry all the time, and he satisfies that hunger with eating anything he can find, but after awhile he suddenly stops feeling any drive to eat. He runs on without any idea of a destination, finally hitchhiking to Mottstown.

Analysis

Food continues to be an important motif in chapters thirteen and fourteen. Earlier in the novel, Christmas hungrily accepted or vehemently refused nourishment from women. In this section he is on the run, and the only food he gets is from poor people he forces to cook for him, or from what nature offers. Throughout his flight, his attitude towards food varies-he is obsessed with eating at first, but then he loses this hunger. Once he loses it, he still eats obsessively because he believes he needs to, often making himself sick. It is only when he finally stops eating that he really feels free, and at peace. This seems to represent Christmas's feeling of a lack of control over his life. When others feed him, they have control over him, and he must live by their rules. Even when he is foraging for himself, he is still being forced to live by someone else's rules. When he stops eating, he is taking his life into his own hands, and although it is a dangerous route, for the first time he is able to exert control over his own identity in a world that has otherwise forced him into a liminal state.

The chase in these chapters also serves as a metaphor for the way Christmas has felt about his racial identity his whole life. He sees white police chasing him as a symbol of the way that white society has been chasing him into blackness. The brogans that he trades for become the physical symbol of blackness, slowly encompassing him as the white men chase him. Although many times in his life Christmas chose to live as a black man, the chase represents the essential lack of choice he felt about this decision, since white society has always seemed to push him out.

This section also further complicates Reverend Hightower's character. To Byron he represents the physical embodiment of true goodness, and Hightower's judgment carries great weight with him. This seems to be reinforced by Hightower's reaction to the news that Christmas has been found. He is so afraid of what will happen to Christmas when the town catches him that he is physically weakened by the news. This is likely because he is so disturbed by violence, and specifically racial violence, but the narrator does not make this distinction clear, and so the issue is rather enigmatic.

In this section Hightower is also described as physically repulsive. His house and his person have such a strong fetid smell, that it seems as if he is already decaying. This shows the other side of Hightower's isolation from society-he may seem too good to live in such a corrupt world, but by taking himself out of society he has removed himself from life to such an extent that he is starting to decay physically.

Thirty years ago a middle-aged couple named Hines moved to Mottstown. The townspeople knew very little about them, except that the man had some kind of job in Memphis that kept him away most of each month. They both seemed a little odd, and the man especially had a slightly crazed and fanatical look, so the town as a whole left them alone. After about five years the man stopped leaving for Memphis, and no one knew how he continued to support himself and his wife. The town eventually learned that he traveled around performing revival services in black churches, and they noticed black women bringing food to the couple's house. The town collectively ignores this information, and so also collectively ignores the Hineses for thirty years. They almost never see Mrs. Hines, but Uncle Doc spends almost all of his time in town. He is dirty and angry-looking, and displays a violent nature that the townspeople take for insanity. The town learns that when Doc preaches in black churches, he is preaching to them to bow before all races lighter than they, and to have humility-this from a man who relies on black charity to survive.

Doc Hines is in Mottstown when Christmas is captured there, and he immediately runs over with everyone else to see what is happening. He manages to fight his way to the center of the crowd, where he strikes Christmas with his stick before he is pulled away. He then starts to try to rally the crowd to kill Christmas. He goes into a kind of trance, and a few of the men carry him back to his house. After the men leave Mrs. Hines lowers her husband into a chair and asks him what he did with Milly's baby thirty years ago.

Christmas, it seems, was caught because after hitchhiking into Mottstown, he spent Saturday walking around the town without trying to hide, and when a man named Halliday asked him if he was Christmas he said that he was. Halliday hit him a few times and held onto him until the whole town had them surrounded, but Christmas never fought back.

Only half an hour after Doc Hines is carried home, he goes back to town and again starts trying to rally the townspeople into killing Christmas. Mrs. Hines comes into town too, and leads Doc into a chair, ordering him to sit there until she comes back. Then she goes looking for the sheriff so that she can get permission to see Christmas in the jail. Before she finds him, the Jefferson police arrive to take Christmas back to their town. The Sheriff of Mottstown and the Sheriff of Jefferson together manage to talk the large crowd out of lynching Christmas, and they get him into a Jefferson police car. Mrs. Hines gets a look at Christmas's face when he gets into the car, and then she and Doc Hines go to look for a way to get to Jefferson.

Byron goes to tell Hightower that Christmas has been caught in Mottstown. Hightower feels that his long-earned peace has been destroyed. Byron also tells him about Mrs. Hines, who is Christmas's grandmother. After Byron leaves, Hightower sits and listens to the music coming from the Sunday evening prayer service. He then sees Byron returning, followed by two short, dumpy looking people-Mr. and Mrs. Hines. Together Bryon and Mrs. Hines tell Hightower the story of Christmas's birth, with interruptions from Doc Hines. Mr. and Mrs. Hines had a daughter, Milly, who at eighteen tried to run away with a man in the traveling circus, whom Doc Hines was positive had black blood. Doc Hines chased after them, and when he caught up with their buggy he leaned in and shot the man dead, grabbing his daughter to bring back home. When they realized that Milly was pregnant, Doc Hines traveled around trying to find a doctor who would abort the baby, but he was unable to, and when he came back home Milly's baby was almost due. He seemed to accept it, and when Milly's time came Mrs. Hines sent him to get the doctor. But instead he just sat outside on the front step with a gun, not allowing Mrs. Hines to find a doctor, and so Milly died in childbirth.

Doc Hines disappeared for a while while Mrs. Hines raised the baby, but then one day near Christmas she went outside to chop wood, and when she returned she found that her husband had come and taken the baby away with him. Mrs. Hines never knew what happened, but Doc Hines took Christmas to the orphanage in Memphis where he worked as the janitor and watched Christmas constantly, waiting for God to punish him for his mother's sin and for his race. Mrs. Hines tells Hightower that they have come to him because she wants for just one day for it to be like Christmas had never committed the murder, and after that day she will let him face justice. Byron is forced to explain that to accomplish this, they want Hightower to say that Christmas was with him the night of the murder. Hightower refuses, and kicks them out.

Analysis

The issue of religion comes up in multiple ways throughout Light In August. In this section we see another example of the corruption of religion. Doc Hines, although he kills fewer people than his grandson, is a far more detestable character than Christmas. A good deal of this negativity comes from his abuse of religion and his deep hypocrisy. Where McEachern's strict Presbyterianism made him abusive to Christmas, he at least had good intentions and lived by the rules that he tried to teach Christmas. Doc Hines, on the other hand, survives on the charity of black people and yet preaches to them of their inferiority, and of the need for them to be humble in the face of lighter skin.

Doc Hines's sermons underscore his deep-seated racism. Christmas implies that McEachern is racist, believing he would be horrified to realize Christmas's racial ancestry, but the reader never sees any example of this. Conversely, nearly all of Doc Hines's actions are wholly based on racism, which he justifies with his belief in a racist God. He despises Christmas because of the chance that his father was partially black to the extent he ultimately instigates the lynching of his only descendant. He is offended by his daughter's sexual sin, but he considers that nothing compared to her sin of carrying a child with black blood or to Christmas's sin of having black blood.

This section also complicates the reader's understanding of justice. The reader knows that Christmas is guilty, and yet, like Hightower, does not really wish for him to be captured. It is also disturbing to see how convinced the police and the town are of Christmas's guilt when all they have to go on is the word of one man with dubious morals who is obsessed with getting the thousand-dollar reward. From the moment the sheriff learns that Christmas is biracial, he assumes his guilt, as does the rest of the town. This makes the justice that Christmas faces seem shockingly lacking; he would probably have been convicted whether he were guilty or not.

The unjust nature of Christmas's situation is emphasized by the case of Doc Hines, who also killed someone in cold blood and yet never had to face any justice at all because the man he killed was (supposedly) partially black. This portrayal of the Southern justice system as determining guilt or innocence based only on race colors the entire society with a tinge of corruption. This is also tied to the problem of organized religion presented in the book; in the South, at least, organized religion allows for a racial hierarchy. This clarifies how a character like Christmas who never experienced love and was unsure of his racial identity during childhood can turn out to be dangerously violent.

This section also highlights the problems of perception once again. After having the narrator focused on Christmas's perspective for much of his flight, the reader suddenly hears the story of his capture from an unnamed man who understands none of the complexities of the story. This underscores how much of communal knowledge is really communal ignorance, and the danger of this becomes clear when the people of Mottstown are just barely persuaded not to lynch Christmas.

Early the next morning, Byron has to run back to Hightower's house because Lena has gone into labor. Byron never made arrangements with a doctor as he had said he would, so he sends Hightower to go help deliver the baby while he goes to town to see if he can find a doctor. By the time the doctor arrives, Hightower has already successfully delivered the baby. Byron walks in the door and, upon hearing the baby cry, runs out and leaves on the mule. The actuality of the baby's birth has finally driven home the fact that Lena is not a virgin, and that Lucas Burch does in fact exist. Hightower walks home, resenting Byron, and makes himself a hearty breakfast before going outside to read Henry IV. He feels proud of himself for having successfully delivered the baby when the doctor and Byron were both too late, and he allows himself to enjoy the sense of pride even though he knows it is sinful. After napping he goes back to the cabin to see Lena, and he learns from her that Doc Hines snuck out while Mrs. Hines was asleep, and that Mrs. Hines then left to go after him. He also tells Lena that the best thing for her to do would be to leave Byron, so that he would not have to give his life to a woman who has already lived so much more than he has, but Lena starts crying because she believes that Byron has already left her.

Hightower is glad to hear this, but he checks at the mill to make sure, and he hears that Byron has indeed quit his job. Byron went to town to see the sheriff about allowing Lucas Burch to go to see his newborn son, but he has to wait while the special hearing of the Grand Jury to indict Christmas is underway. He goes to Mrs. Beard's boarding house to tell her that he will be leaving Jefferson, but she figures it all out before he says anything. Byron tells the sheriff the whole story, and he agrees that he will have a deputy take Lucas out to see Lena, without telling him where he is going. Byron hides outside the cabin until he sees Lucas go in, and then he takes his suitcase, gets on his mule, and starts out of Jefferson.

After cresting a hill, he stops for a moment to look back at the cabin, and as he watches he sees Lucas climb out of the back window of the cabin and start to run away. Without even really thinking about it, he suddenly knows that he has to do his best to chase Lucas down and fight him, so he goes after him. The deputy had taken Lucas to the cabin with the promise that his reward would be waiting for him there. When he walked in and saw Lena, she was completely calm, but he panicked. He strung together some half excuses, but she eventually put him out of his misery by saying that he must be busy. He grabbed at the chance to leave, and escaped through the window.

Lucas runs two miles to the train tracks, then finds someone who will take a message to the sheriff for him. Byron runs into this messenger, who tells him where he can find Lucas. Byron comes up behind Lucas, but he warns Lucas before hitting him, and so Lucas, who is the taller and more vicious man, quickly bests him. Lucas runs away while Byron recovers, and when a train passes, Byron sees Lucas jump on. Byron starts to walk, and a wagon soon passes him. The driver tells him that Christmas was killed in town about an hour ago. He had escaped from the prison and ended up hiding in Hightower's house, where he was found.

Gavin Stevens, the highly educated District Attorney, has his own theories for why Christmas chose Hightower's house as a place of refuge. He explains to his friend that he believes that when Mrs. Hines went to the jail to see Christmas, she had started to have hope that she could save him, and so she told Christmas about Hightower. Gavin believes that because of this Christmas saw Hightower as his last chance for salvation, and so he ran to his house. His theory is that Christmas's white blood tried to save him, but his black blood made him hit Hightower over the head with a pistol and then desert him, leaving him under a table where he let himself be shot to death without ever firing his pistol.

A young captain in the State National Guard, Percy Grimm, has become convinced that he needs to lead a squadron to maintain peace and prevent anyone from lynching Christmas. Neither his commander nor Sheriff Kennedy thinks it is a good idea, but Grimm is so determined that they cannot stop him. While the police move Christmas to the courthouse, he suddenly bolts away, and Percy Grimm immediately gets in on the chase. He spots Christmas rather quickly, and follows him through a small cabin to Hightower's house. Grimm and the other men that follow him find Hightower lying bleeding on the floor, but he does not tell them where Christmas is. Grimm somehow knows to find him in the kitchen, and he empties his gun into Christmas before the other men can follow him. When they enter, they see Grimm kneeling in front of the still-living Christmas, castrating him with a butcher knife. Christmas lies silently staring for a moment, before the blood gushes out of him and he dies.

Analysis

Chapters seventeen through nineteen of Light In August focus on the process of storytelling itself. The problems of perspective and knowledge come up throughout the novel, but this section really ties these problems into the general problem of storytelling. The most climactic scenes of the novel are housed in this section, and yet the narrator is suddenly much more distant from the action, and the reader is told everything from novel perspectives.

Throughout the book, the story rarely moves forward chronologically, and so the reader learns many facts out of order. This is also true with the main protagonist's death, which the reader learns of before the scene describing the death takes place. Not only is the news of Christmas's death out of order, but it also comes from the mouth of a stranger, a wholly incidental character. A more detailed account of the death scene follows, but it comes from another new character, who is something of a parody of the intellectual upper class and whose understanding of Christmas's death is clearly colored by racism. Only then does the narrator himself recount the violent tale of Christmas's death in full. The narrator, however, conveys this part of the story through yet another new character: the racist, militaristic, and not at all likeable young man who is the one to kill Christmas. Thus when the reader finally gains a sense of confidence in the storyteller, the story is still filtered through an unreliable source. This powerfully underscores the unreliability of the narrator throughout the whole novel.

Gavin Stevens' account is especially problematic, for he uses the same kind of language and sentence structure as the narrator does, and it is abundantly clear that almost everything he says is an assumption based on almost no evidence. Gavin Stevens' account not only serves to highlight the fact that no narrator is ever without a specific perspective that colors the story, but it also underscores the absurdity of Christmas's racial identity crisis. Stevens is convinced that in Christmas's final flight, his white blood and his black blood were at war with each other, causing him to act in remarkably different ways. The absurdity of his belief, not to mention its virulently racist underpinnings, casts a new light on the powerful importance that Christmas, and everyone he ever met, placed on his racial identity.

Stevens' belief that Christmas's white blood compelled him to seek spiritual salvation in Reverend Hightower, while his black blood compelled him to strike the minister down, is clearly ridiculous, yet it reminds the reader of all of the other assumptions made about this character based on his white or black blood. Christmas himself tries to "inhale" blackness so that he can stop being split between two worlds, and the entire town of Jefferson bases the assumption of his guilt on his blackness. In the absurdity of this reasoning, it becomes clear that Christmas's tortured quest for a racial identity has nothing to do with his race in itself, but only on societal perceptions of identity.

Reverend Hightower was an only child, born to a fifty-year-old father and an invalid mother. His father, a minister, though living at a time when slavery was a normal part of life, refused to eat food that had been grown or cooked by a slave. Because of this, Hightower's mother almost starved to death during the Civil War and became an invalid for the rest of her life. Hightower's father had gone to fight in the war, although he never fired his musket, and he always wore a frock cloak rather than an army uniform. As a child Hightower became oddly obsessed with the Civil War, sneaking up to the attic to look at his father's old frock and constantly asking their servant to tell him the stories about his grandfather's valiant deeds. Hightower's grandfather was very different from his father, and never set foot inside his son's house after his marriage. Hightower's father had, however, lost some of the sanctimoniousness that had irritated his father by the time he came back from the Civil War. He also had learned some medicine during the war, and so became a doctor.

Hightower grew up with three people who while alive already seemed like ghosts: his mother, his father, and a former slave of his grandfather's who came to live with Hightower's family after she finally accepted that the grandfather and her husband had both died in the war. Hightower's primary source of joy as a child was listening to the servant tell him stories of his grandfather killing hundreds of Yankee soldiers, although the idea of his father killing even one would make him ill for days.

Hightower saw joining the seminary both as a chance to let his spirit grow in a safe shelter, and as a path that could lead him to Jefferson, the town where his grandfather was shot and killed during the war. While at the seminary he met his future wife, who was the daughter of one of the ministers who taught there. He thought their love sprang up spontaneously through the notes they left each other in a hollow tree, but really she had watched him from the time of his arrival with the cold calculation of someone desperate for a way out. After three years, she brought up the idea of marriage to him, but she didn't even try to hide the fact that her primary motivation was to escape from the seminary. He was not hurt, simply believing that he had been wrong about what love is. His illusions about marriage, love, and the seminary thus dispelled, he accepted his life for what it was but still looked forward to the idea of living in Jefferson with great excitement.

Hightower's grandfather and his men had rode into Jefferson, a garrisoned Yankee town, and set fire to the stores, all without being shot. It was only when Grandfather Hightower tried to steal chickens from a chicken coop on their way out that he was shot in the back. They never knew who shot him, but Hightower chooses to believe it was the wife of the Confederate soldier whose chicken coop he was looting.

Hightower sits at dusk, looking out the window and thinking about all of this. He questions whether his wife's fall was his fault, and whether in marrying her he had only been serving his own interests. He also admits to himself that when he was forced to step down from the church he did his best to make it look as though he was completely reluctant, but really he was glad to leave-he had realized that it was not for him. As he sits there, he suddenly sees the faces of everyone he has ever known rise before him, and he realizes that he is dying. Then what he has been waiting for happens: the ghosts of his grandfather and his men thunder past on horseback.

A young furniture repairer and dealer returns home after a week of travel and tells his wife the story of something that happened to him on the road. He had been stopped by Lena and Byron, who asked for a ride to wherever he was going. He accepted, assuming that they were a family, but that night while they were camping out he overheard them talking and realized that they were not married, and that they were still searching for Lucas Burch. He overheard Byron trying to convince Lena to give up searching for Lucas and intimating that she should marry him instead. As usual she did not say yes or no, but he got himself so worked up that she eventually had to kick him out of the wagon where she was sleeping. He walked off into the woods, and when morning comes he still had not returned. Lena got into the back of the wagon and they started off again, without Byron. Eventually they came around a turn to find Byron waiting for them, and he got back in the wagon. The furniture repairer tells his wife that he is pretty certain that Lena did not have any desire to find Lucas, that she just wanted to keep on traveling for as long as she could.

Analysis

As in the previous sections of Light In August, in the final chapters Faulkner meditates on the problems of storytelling. Lena and Byron's story is resolved by an unnamed character who only spends two days with the pair, and whose conclusions arise mostly from conjecture. His motivation in telling the story also may have colored these conclusions, thus highlighting the problem of creating an unbiased presentation of any story.

By ending the story in yet another storyteller's voice, Faulkner puts his own narrator on a level with all of the characters who tell stories throughout the novel, thus ultimately throwing his own narrator's motivations into question and underscoring his essential unreliability. Yet he also creates a model for storytelling from multiple voices as a possible way to avoid the pitfall of perspective that is highlighted as a problem so often in Light In August.

The power of storytelling and its ability to give the past significant power in the present is also highlighted in the final chapter. Hightower's life is completely shaped by the stories that his grandfather's former slave tells him of his grandfather's participation in the Civil War. His own father, who also fought in the war and who was a physical presence in the young Hightower's life, does not have nearly so much of an effect on the boy, because he is not a story.

The final two stories, Hightower's and Lena's, stand in interesting contrast to each other. Hightower has spent his entire adult life in the same town, only leaving his house to buy his necessities. His final scene shows how much the past still engulfs his life-the ghosts that represent the history of the place and the ghosts of all the people he has known are the last things that he sees. Lena, in contrast, is constantly in motion. The book opens with her arrival in Mississippi, and ends with her arrival in Tennessee. By moving constantly, Lena avoids the pitfalls of the past that keep Hightower from ever truly living in the present. There are no ghosts to surround her as she travels on the road. Lena's obsession with travel, and thus with the present, makes her an alternate model for how to live in the South.

• Biography of William Faulkner
• About Light In August
• Character List
• Major Themes
• Glossary of Terms
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters One and Two
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters Three to Five
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters Six and Seven
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters Eight and Nine
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters Ten to Twelve
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters Seventeen to Nineteen
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters Twenty and Twenty-One
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• Interracial Relationships in the Antebellum and Early Postbellum South
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