Light in August: Similes 7 key examples

Lena is moving through her days "like something moving forever and without progress across an urn." Faulkner seems to be referring to the art that often decorated ancient Greek urns. These large vase-like containers were ubiquitous in ancient Greece and were meant to hold food, beverages, and even ashes. Some urns were primarily ornamental. Both ornamental and functional urns bore intricate paintings, which often served another function: they told stories. By turning an urn all the way around, the viewer can often see a myth or story play out around the outside of the vessel. Because urns are round, the viewer eventually gets back to the beginning of the story.

Lena's story is playing out day after day like a story on an urn that keeps resetting once it is turned all the way around. This simile captures the monotony of Lena's life on the road. At the same time, it also compares her journey to something of mythological proportions that might be worth depicting on a precious work of art. As far as Lena's community is concerned, she is nobody important. She has no money, next to no social influence, and no place to live. Her family would rather forget her altogether because her pregnancy out of wedlock embarrasses them. Through this simile, Faulkner urges the reader to pay Lena the attention her community refuses her. This outcast woman is at the center of the story Faulkner is about to tell about the South, its history, and its future. Her journey to find the father of her child is in some ways just as important as, for instance, Odysseus's long journey home from the war in Greek mythology.

Hightower has never been a very good minister because he does not have much interest in conforming to social expectations within the church. He fails to prioritize his marriage, which the townspeople see as a scandalous insult to the sanctity of the institution. After his wife is killed in Memphis and he gains notoriety as the minister with the wife who "went bad," his congregants turn on him. In this passage, congregants from other churches come to his sermon "as though to a show." They want to see what this infamous minister will do the week after his wife's funeral.

While the impulse to rubberneck is human enough, these churchgoers are letting this human impulse get the better of them. Religion is supposed to guide its followers to behave in morally upstanding ways. Treating church as a place to go for entertainment and gossip is hypocritical. Once Hightower steps down as a minister, he begins to see more and more how Southern Protestantism has been warped into a tool not for promoting moral good, but rather for reinforcing social dynamics and excluding those who don't fall into line. He reflects on this distortion especially on the night before Christmas escapes from jail. He can hear the familiar music from several churches. It makes him think about how the congregants inside are so strict with themselves and others that they would rather kill Christmas than forgive him. This harsh refusal to forgive seems wrong and illogical to Hightower. It makes for a community filled with shame, alienation, and hatred, which in turn leads to violent and unforgivable behavior such as lynching. To Faulkner, there is even a sinister comedy in the way the churchgoers cling to ideas that are backfiring on them. Hightower helps Faulkner offer a critical picture of Southern Protestantism as a culture that is so obsessed with morality that it is rife with immorality.

Christmas imagines that the sunny, "yellow" day is staring at him as a "prone" (lying down) and "somnolent" (sleepy) cat might stare at a person. At first, this language suggests that Christmas feels relaxed. However, a sleepy cat is easily startled. Christmas is currently experiencing a peaceful moment, but he does not know when "the day" will get startled or violent, springing up to attack him. There is almost an inevitable sense that this moment cannot last, and that "the day" and forward-moving time are looking at him almost like prey on which they will eventually decide to pounce. 

For a man who has just committed murder, Christmas imagines himself to have very little agency. He does not stare the day in the face. Rather, the day stares at him. Christmas is not even sure throughout this scene whether he has already killed Joanna or whether he has simply thought a great deal about killing her. It is only through context clues and details about the murder that are confirmed later in the novel that the reader knows for certain that Joanna is already dead in this passage. By personifying the day and comparing it to a cat, Faulkner emphasizes the idea that Christmas is no longer in control of his own fate. He is subject to the whims of the day and the people around him—people who likewise may not have full control over their own fates. Arguably, he was not even in full control of his actions when he killed Joanna. A lifetime of his trauma collided with Joanna's generational trauma, and the result was violence. This is just one example of how the characters in the novel suffer because they are driven by social forces much greater than themselves.

Christmas's only mistake at the restaurant is ordering both pie and coffee when he can only afford one. This youthful accident is clearly born out of his excitement to talk to Bobbie, the object of his months-long crush. To Christmas, it is an unforgivable error. He gets away from the restaurant and begins to avoid it at all costs. He pours himself into work so that he does not have to dwell so much on the deep shame he feels. The shame never goes away; instead, as Faulkner writes here, it turns into something like a gramophone record that has been played too many times for the sound to come through clearly. He feels the shame over and over until it is no longer so crisp and sharp.

This simile helps make sense of Joe Christmas's deeply wounded psychology. Mr. Hines's and McEachern's abuse has primed him to feel extreme shame for the most human of blunders. This shame sticks with him and plays on a loop through his head until it fades into the chorus of other shameful records that make up the background music in his mind. When the shame gets unbearable, he becomes violent. His relationship with Joanna is so violent and unhealthy in part because Christmas arrives at it with a lifetime of trauma and shame that he does not know how to shed.

The judge in this scenario feels "outrage" because the man on trial has insulted the court of law. The bailiff is specifically tasked with keeping order in the court, so to spit on their sleeve is to express disrespect for the very system the judge heads. Even though no one has spit on the judge himself, he is angry that his power has been undermined.

The judge's outrage, as Faulkner points out, is "impersonal." It only makes sense if the goal of the court is to punish and control lawbreakers, thereby maintaining its own power over them. The stakes couldn't be higher for the man on trial: the judge is about to decide whether he lives or dies. A little spit on the bailiff's sleeve may upend the order in the court, but the judge's sense of power and control is hardly more important than a human life.

McEachern's outrage over Christmas's clandestine outing with Bobbie has a similar logic to the judge's outrage. If the most important thing in the world is for Christmas to respect McEachern's authority, the boy has committed an unforgivable crime. However, readers could just as easily accuse McEachern of wielding an unforgivable amount of authority over his adoptive child. Where is his respect for Christmas's freedom? Much of the conflict in the novel involves this kind of clash between authoritarian and liberal worldviews. Many of those who hold power over others, such as the White citizens of Jefferson, believe that their power is right and just. To challenge it is to commit a moral offense. Others hold a different perspective and believe that everyone has a right to freedom and self-determination. Characters like Joe Christmas, Lena Grove, and Gail Hightower help Faulkner make the point that authoritarian attitudes in the Jim Crow South make it very difficult to live according to more liberal principles.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was a Victorian poet known for his works about grief, memory, mythology, and history. His poetry is known for the way it uses not only written language, but also sound. Anyone might be swept away by the "fine galloping language" of Tennyson's poetry. Hightower, though, seems especially predisposed to it because of his strong interest in the past and his seminary training. He spent much of his life listening to and learning to craft sermons that relied on music and speech to move people's emotions. Hightower compares his reading experience to "listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand." Cathedrals are specially designed to make sound bounce all over the place, resounding with extra force to drive home a spiritual point. Tennyson's language engages Hightower's senses and bowls him over just like the sound of chanting in a cathedral.

The key difference between Tennyson's poetry and a eunuch's chanting is that Hightower "does not even need to not understand" Tennyson. This line is one of Faulkner's frequent double negatives that takes some consideration to parse. Religious chants are often performed in old, sacred languages. In the context of religion, the sacred language itself is more important than congregants' ability to understand it. Hightower remembers listening to religious chants in a language he did not know and being expected to find them deeply spiritual. Hightower delights in Tennyson's secular "chant," which he finds more meaningful because it is written in English. There is no need with Tennyson for Hightower to pretend that the content of the chant doesn't matter to him.

Thematically, Tennyson also appeals to the strongest force in Hightower's mind: memory. Hightower was always more interested in his family history than religion, even during his seminary training. He cannot stop obsessing over the grandfather who died before he was even born. Tennyson's "chants" usually have something to do with memory and grief. One of his most celebrated poems is "In Memoriam A.H.H.," a long and moving elegy for a friend of his who died tragically from a brain bleed at just 22. The way Hightower swaps scripture for Tennyson in this scene suggests that he practices reminiscence as though it is his religion.

Faulkner compares the working class townspeople to "monks in a cloister." Like many of Faulkner's imaginative similes, this comparison takes a bit of untangling. Monks are religious devotees who often spend their lives in monasteries, shut away from the secular world so that they can contemplate God. A cloister is an architectural fixture at the center of many monasteries. Consisting of walkways along the inner walls of an enclosed quadrangle or yard, the cloister is a place where monks can commune with one another and with God while also remaining separate from the outside world. The "countrymen in overalls" gather beneath the courtroom like monks in a cloister, but instead of talking about God they talk about their own "money and crops." For better or worse, these townspeople's interests are limited in much the same way that monks' interests might be said to be limited by the walls of the cloister.

Faulkner goes on to describe how, as the townspeople talk about money and crops, they are all waiting eagerly to find out what will happen in the courtroom. They look up to it almost as monks in a cloister might look up to heaven. It is ironic, Faulkner suggests, that they are so deeply invested in the verdict of the Grand Jury when they have always treated Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden as outsiders whose affairs do not belong within their "cloister." By highlighting the situational irony, Faulkner helps the reader see that the townspeople do not care about Christmas and Joanna so much as they care about their tawdry romance and murder plot. They want to know how Christmas will be punished for his taboo, possibly interracial relationship with an unmarried woman. Whereas monks look up to God, the "countrymen in overalls" look up to a justice system that punishes people for breaking race and gender codes.