Light in August: Motifs 5 key examples

Armistid and Lena do not exchange very many words. Outwardly, Armistid seems like a quiet person who does not have much to say. Between clipped pieces of dialogue, however, Faulkner delves into Armistid's stream of consciousness. His thoughts are not all complete, but they give the reader the sense that he has some real anxieties on Lena's behalf that he is refusing to say out loud to her. For all she knows, this man has shown her some simple kindness and will never think about her again.

Armistid is not a major character. Still, Faulkner highlights the mismatch between his inner reality and the outer world. It is not so much that Armistid's feelings are of major consequence to the novel. Rather, his stream of consciousness draws attention to the fact that even a passing stranger has a head full of thoughts, memories, and beliefs nobody will ever know about. Every character in the novel is far more complicated than the other characters want them to be. The stream of consciousness motif invites the reader to notice moments when characters are failing to understand one another.

This flashback comes over Joe Christmas on the night he kills Joanna. In particular, the flashback centers on the traumatic experience Christmas had when he accidentally witnessed the dietician having sex. She caught him lurking behind a curtain, where he had been sneaking tastes from a tube of toothpaste that to him was like forbidden candy. At five years old, Christmas did not understand everything that was happening to him. He only knew that the dietician found him when he threw up the toothpaste. His childish gluttony led her to berate him, accuse him of spying on her, and call him a racial slur. She began treating him as an enemy. As his first encounter with sex and clandestine relationships, this moment instilled in Christmas a strong association between sex and violence, disgust, self-hatred, and self-blame. It is no wonder he has had a tumultuous relationship with Joanna. While his violence is not excusable, it begins to make sense in light of the flashback.

This difficult passage demonstrates that for Faulkner, flashbacks are more than a narrative device to reveal information to the reader. The line "memory believes before knowing remembers" gets at the difference between conscious and unconscious memory. To believe is to feel with one's whole being that something is true. Memories from early childhood especially might form the basis of beliefs people carry around with them, even if they are not consciously aware of the memories. Christmas has been carrying this memory around with him his whole life, even if he has not fully thought it through before. Eventually, Faulkner claims, "knowing remembers." When something in the present triggers a feeling or challenges a belief, a person might begin consciously remembering the event that first formed that belief.  Finally, on the night he murders Joanna, Christmas "knows remembers believes" the traumatic experience that has led to his violent relationship with Joanna. He still believes everything he learned during the experience, but he starts consciously remembering where those beliefs come from.

Other characters, too, are subject to flashbacks in which their past bubbles up and takes over their present. Hightower, for instance, can hardly keep his mind on anything but flashbacks. All of the characters in the novel have their own struggles. Still, they all share a common challenge, which is to find a way forward even when the past won't stop coming back to haunt them. A few characters, such as Lena and Byron, are successful. Many characters die or lose their minds trying.

At first, it does not make sense that Christmas would want the door to be locked. After all, that would make it more difficult for him to get into the house. Nor does it make sense on the surface that he harbors such hostility toward a woman who has objectively wronged him far less than many other people in his life. This is the same kind of hostility he holds toward Mrs. McEachern and toward the Black girl he beats up as a teenager. None of these women have come close to abusing Christmas in the horrific ways Mr. McEachern and Mr. Hines both did for years. The resentment seems misplaced.

In this passage, Faulkner explains where some of Christmas's resentment comes from. The night before, Christmas wanted to sexually assault Joanna. She surprised him by consenting to sex before he could force himself on her. He is angry to find that she has left the door unlocked because it means she is unbothered by his attempted assault. He wants to use her to feel powerful, and instead he feels like a harmless Black servant who is allowed to come and go from her house as he pleases. It is not Joanna he resents so much as the feelings she brings up about his Blackness.

The other instances of paradoxical resentment also begin to make sense when readers consider how Christmas feels in the presence of the women. When he is a teenager, his friends send him into a barn with a kidnapped Black girl as a twisted game: they all plan to use their Whiteness to get away with assaulting her. Face to face with the girl, Christmas feels overwhelmed by the understanding that he, too, is Black just like her. He beats her up because he hates this reminder. Mrs. McEachern, meanwhile, shows kindness and pity to Christmas in private but refuses to do anything to stop her husband's abuse. This covert kindness and pity makes Christmas hate her because it emphasizes his role in the house as a helpless and pitiful orphan who is supposed to be grateful for the McEacherns' charity. His confused feelings toward Mrs. McEachern and the others mirror his confused feelings as a child toward the Dietician with her manipulative kindness. He would rather battle against clear-cut enemies like Mr. McEachern and Mr. Hines than against people who make him feel bad without outwardly hurting him.

The reader has already heard this story from Christmas's perspective. Christmas waved down the passing car and asked for a ride. The boy and girl in the front seat started acting strange and refusing to stop the car, so Christmas bailed out. Only afterwards did he realize he had been brandishing a gun. He did not mean to threaten the young couple at all; he only wanted a ride and was too distraught to realize how he came off.

The boy truly seems to believe that his life was in danger. It is hard to blame him for this fear, given that Christmas had a gun and was clearly agitated. The boy is not lying in the slightest. Still, the sheriff and townspeople absorb his subjective version of the truth as the objective truth. The reader, who knows another subjective truth, can see that objective events are being accidentally distorted.

As a modernist writer, Faulkner was interested in how he could experiment with storytelling to best represent life in rural Mississippi. The retelling of the same moments from different perspectives helps him offer his readers a more complete sense of all his characters' reality than is possible with a single telling. At the same time, there is a chasm between what he can offer his readers and what the characters are able to experience. One of the tragedies of the novel is that while the reader can see how and why events play out the way they do, most of the characters are caught in their own distorted versions of the truth. They are thus doomed to misunderstand one another and descend into unnecessary conflict.

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.