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Foreshadowing
Frame Story
Explanation and Analysis—Backstory Vs. Plot:
While the main plot of Light in August all comes together in the present moment of the early 1930s, there is a way to read this plot as one massive frame story for all of the characters' backstories. Most novels include some backstory and may even include some flashbacks to moments before the main action begins. After all, in the world of a novel, the characters begin developing their personalities long before any reader meets them. The past, before the narrative begins, is almost always relevant to the plot.
Light in August includes more backstory and more flashbacks than most novels. Faulkner is fascinated by the way each of the characters' lives has led them to this one week where they all collide. While all of the characters live near each other, most of them have had less influence on each other than it might first appear. For example, it might seem as though Brown has irrevocably altered the course of Lena's life by getting her pregnant and abandoning her. However, Lena's backstory suggests that she was always in a precarious position with her family. She was already at risk of becoming pregnant and disowned, and Brown simply set things in motion. Brown's behavior is still harmful, but it may just as easily have been directed toward a different woman. The fact that Lena ends up running off with Byron further suggests that these characters are somewhat interchangeable in the course of one another's lives. What really matters is who they each are before they come to Jefferson.
Hightower is another character whose backstory is more important than most of what he does in the main plot. Arguably his biggest intervention in the course of the plot is delivering Lena's baby. Someone had to help Lena, but the delivery is even more significant in the novel as the penultimate event in the character arc that began with the death of Hightower's grandfather in the Civil War. There is almost a sense that Hightower needed a baby to deliver to push his character arc forward, and Lena happened to be there.
Christmas and Joanna's paths collide in the present in such an intense way that they both end up murdered. However, their time together is fairly limited. Their relationship gives them both the opportunity to think back through their traumatic lives before they knew one another. Their violent encounter is tragic, but there is almost the sense that they were each careening toward some horrific end regardless. They are not all that important to one another except in that they offer each other the opportunity for their individual tragedies to play out.
While a heavy emphasis on backstory can sometimes indicate poor writing, Faulkner is deliberate in his use of the main action as a frame for the individual characters' stories. He uses the device to emphasize memory's power to trap people in their personal autobiographies. The characters are all walking side by side through the same plot, but that plot triggers for each of them a unique experience that is made up mostly of things that happened before any of them met. For Faulkner, these stories are the main event.
Related Themes:
