Light in August: Metaphors 7 key examples

Both the fire and the August light are metaphors for old patterns of violence that transfix and overtake the town of Jefferson as though it is under a spell. The fire is visible far and wide. It piques people's curiosity and draws them to a horrific murder scene. The townspeople begin telling their own collective story about what happened to Joanna, but their story draws more on stereotypes and old, fearful ideas about race and gender than on the evidence they might find if they looked a little harder. Like the August light, the fire seems to turn Jefferson into a place where old stories come to life and prevent people from seeing things in the context of present reality. Christmas agonizes over his racial background and begins to see himself almost as an enslaved person on the run 60 years earlier. The White townspeople give in to the merciless desire to hunt Christmas down and kill him, playing out another old story. Hightower is completely overcome with memories.

Then, after the fire dies down and the strange light passes, things settle again. Lena has her baby and goes on with her life, as do the rest of the townspeople. Neither the fire nor the light is responsible for everyone's behavior over the course of the novel. Still, the fire does furnish the right conditions for everyone to lose themselves to the memories, beliefs, and fears that began forming in their parents' and grandparents' minds, long before they were even born.

In this metaphor, moving requires an electrical signal to flow between Christmas's "volition" (his will, or desire) and his "sentience" (his awareness of himself and his surroundings). Right now, he is paralyzed because he can't bring the two together. Christmas still wants something that is at odds with the situation in which he finds himself. He fled to the brothel after killing McEachern. He made a brief stop at home first to get some money, but he hoped to elope with Bobbie and go on the run. This fantasy about his future has been giving him hope while he has endured McEachern's abuse. Even though he had not planned to kill his adoptive father, he was elated about the idea of making his fantasy a reality with Bobbie.

When Christmas arrived at the brothel, he found Bobbie cursing him and throwing racial slurs at him. Mame and Max called for some strangers (probably the people they use regularly for security at the brothel) to "take" him. They all abandoned him, unconscious, on the floor. Christmas's entire hope for his future has been obliterated. He can't move until he adjusts his expectations and begins wanting something far more modest than a marriage with Bobbie.

The metaphor of a shorted electrical circuit is useful when it comes to understanding Christmas's relationship to free will. Throughout the novel, he often feels stuck, as though the world is happening to him and he is helpless to intervene. Then, suddenly, he will have a violent outburst where he exerts a huge amount of power over someone. In the aftermath, he once again loses his sense of agency. The so-called circuitry that is supposed to help him engage with the world in healthy ways has been badly damaged by the chronic trauma and racism he has endured at the hands of his bullies.

Christmas is running into the woods, but he imagines that he is also running into "the black abyss" that has been trying to close over his head and drown him for his entire life. Putting on the shoes is the real turning point. Feeling them on his feet is what makes him imagine the abyss "bearing now upon his ankles the definite and ineradicable gauge of its upward moving." When he puts on the shoes, he wades into the black waters that have always been trying to close over him.

The shoes are so symbolic to Christmas because he associates them so strongly with the Blackness of the woman he took them from. He even thinks, hatefully, that they smell like a Black person—whatever he imagines that smell to be. The Black woman's black shoes represent a step into Christmas's own Black identity, which he has always feared and hated as if it is an abyss threatening to drown him. From the feet up, Christmas begins to feel as though he really is Black. Faulkner begins to describe the sensory horrors and paranoia of Christmas's run from the law. Soon, it almost sounds as though Faulkner is describing the flight of an enslaved Black person away from their enslaver. By putting on the shoes, Christmas takes on generations of Black American trauma. The reader never finds out with certainty whether he has any Black heritage. Regardless, he lives out the rest of his short life as a Black man in the South.

Hightower compares time to a wild waterway. The events of the week since Joanna was found dead have been a torrent, or fast-running water. The following week is an abyss waiting to be filled with more rushing events. Hightower envisions the present moment as "the brink of cataract." He and the rest of the characters stand poised on the edge of what is about to become a waterfall. The water that will bring everyone down into the abyss does not have any just motivation for flowing the way it does, except that it cannot stop itself from following the course that has been carved out for it. Likewise, the events around Joanna and Christmas have been gaining momentum and are unfolding in a way that Hightower does not see a way to stop. Whether by legal execution or by lynching, Hightower believes that Jefferson is about to kill Christmas, thereby plunging itself into a moral abyss from which it will never climb out.

What Hightower seems to find most frustrating is that on a collective level, Jefferson could change the course of time and history. They could all decide that it would be a better moral decision to treat themselves and Christmas with grace instead of cruelty. However, there is a powerful collective consensus in Jefferson that cruelty is justice. Even the churches to which Hightower once committed his life have become a place where people practice cruelty instead of forgiveness. Social institutions like the church might easily carve out a new waterway for the torrent of events, but one person alone is helpless to do so.

Hightower is just one among a whole cast of characters fighting their own lonely battles against the course of history and time. For a community where no one seems to feel all that included, Jefferson is highly set in its ways. The novel ends with Christmas's lynching and the sense that nothing will ever really change. Racist violence is fated to continue playing out on a loop in the town, and individuals are fated to get caught in the loop. The only thing that could interrupt it, Faulkner suggests, would be massive cultural change that doesn't seem to be coming anytime soon.

Stevens thinks that Mrs. Hines initially had a modest goal in coming to Jefferson. Nervous that Mr. Hines would incite a lynching, she wanted to make sure her grandson got a trial and execution in the court of law. He compares hope in the human heart or mind to something produced by machinery. If that machinery goes unused for a long time, he conjectures, it is difficult to start it up again. This is what happened to Mrs. Hines: she believed for 30 years that her grandson was dead, so she could not immediately muster the hope that he could actually live. After a little while longer, she began to hope almost too boldly that if Christmas escaped to Hightower's house, he might escape execution. Stevens believes that she advised Christmas to go to the old man's house, where the mob found him and murdered him. Mrs. Hines did not have the opportunity to calibrate her "machinery for hoping," and thus Christmas died just as horribly as she first feared he would.

This metaphor has wider implications in the novel as well. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is a stagnant place, where people are very stuck in their ways. As both a modernist writer and a Southern Gothic writer, Faulkner is interested in how such a place contends with a changing world and changing expectations in the 20th century. The idea that the "machinery for hoping" needs to be cared for, run, and calibrated in order to work properly gets at the heart of the problem he sees for the South in the 20th century: history has such a vice grip on the region that the machinery for hoping is in disrepair. Someone who comes along and tries to operate it will find it in such disrepair that it might very well backfire. This seems to be what happened to Joanna's entire family, which was killed off for its commitment to abolition and Black voting rights.

Kennedy is the sheriff of Jefferson. The man isn't sure that Kennedy will appreciate seeing Grimm's uniform because it might make him feel as though his authority is being disrespected. Grimm, who is the wrong age to have fought in any wars, has always wanted to be in the military. He got his uniform through a recent act that allowed civilians to take on some military duties and privileges, and he wears it proudly every chance he gets. However, it bears the insignia of the United States. The man thinks Christmas's execution or lynching is a town matter to be handled within Jefferson, not a national matter to be handled by the federal government.

The way the man juxtaposes Jefferson and Washington suggests that he may also be referring to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Jefferson Davis was widely regarded in the Confederate South as their own George Washington. If the man responding to Grimm uses "Washington" as a metaphor for the federal government, "Jefferson" becomes a metaphor for the South as a sovereign state. The man worries that Grimm's uniform will challenge not only the sheriff, but also the entire narrative that the South is in charge of handling its own "trouble."

This metaphor helps Faulkner express how memory and forward-moving reality grate against one another. Hightower is the vehicle careening along toward something. What that something is, neither he nor the reader is quite sure. Optimistically, it is a future where he has a coherent narrative to tell himself about the Civil War, racism, and the generational trauma in which his family has played a part. As he ages, this coherent narrative disappears over the horizon. The only thing he is surely moving toward is death, passing by further incomprehensible scenes of injustice along the way.

At the same time, the vehicle representing Hightower is composed of multiple parts. If the body of the vehicle is Hightower's living, aging body, it moves along its path by way of wheels. At least one of the wheels explicitly stands in for Hightower's thinking. His thoughts carry him along his life path. The problem is that, as the stream of consciousness in this chapter reveals, Hightower's thinking is always circling around the past: he dwells on his childhood, his young adulthood, and even his grandfather's death years before he was born. His body has no choice but to travel forward on the road toward the future, but the wheel of his thinking is always trying to take him off the road.

Faulkner mentions a third part of the wheel, the axle, which strains to hold the wheel on. In the extended metaphor, the axle is the part of Hightower's mind that tries to hold everything together so that he can be a composed member of society. When the wheel of his thinking veers off into the past, this part of him tries to correct course and bring his thinking back to the present. During the stream of consciousness in this chapter, the axle comes under enormous strain. At first when Hightower sinks deep into reminiscence, the whole vehicle slows down as the wheel wobbles and sticks. It is as though while Hightower is consumed by memory, he stops moving so fast through time. However, the strain eventually overtakes the axle's ability to hold the wheel on. In this passage, the wheel of thinking finally comes off. Hightower's thinking begins wheeling free, the whole vehicle discomposed. It is not clear whether Hightower is dying in this passage, whether he is having some kind of temporary reverie, or whether he has lost his mind entirely. What is clear is that the novel leaves Hightower at a moment when he has given up making sense of his memories and has simply surrendered to the feelings and internal experiences they evoke.