Responses to Faulkner’s Light in August

“There were a dozen men who admitted having bought whiskey from Christmas for over two years, meeting him at night and alone in the woods behind an old colonial plantation house two miles from town, in which a middleaged spinster named Burden lived alone” (36).

The reader need barely have cognitive functions to realize that one more time, Faulkner has presented his audience with an isolated, melancholy spinster. Instead, what is most fascinating about this brief passage is that Christmas operated his business shrouded in the darkness of night and went utterly undetected in his plight for a couple of years. An interesting parallel can be drawn between this instance and pre-Civil war slavery, in which slave owners ran their plantations with dark, Negro workers; these actions were not recognized or refuted until years later, resulting in nationwide unrest and eventually war.

“And that’s all it took; all that was lacking. Byron listened quietly, thinking to himself how people everywhere are about the same, but that it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people’s names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind” (71).

Another theme that appears often in Faulkner – though not necessarily a central feature of his critics’ focus – is the effects of living in a small town or in a small county, namely Yoknapatawpha County. While many characters do travel, they tend to travel together or coincidentally, end up in the same place. The small town environment does not allow anyone to truly hide; Miss Coldfield, Addie, Emily Rose, Mrs. Compson and several others are all isolated due to either sickness or bitter depression and yet, none of them can maintain their privacy forever. Likewise, it is even more difficult for regular members of society to keep to themselves and live without judgment.

“‘Listen. He says he has nursed a blasphemer and an ingrate. I dare you to tell him what he has nursed. That he has nursed a nigger beneath his own roof, with his own food at his own table'” (168).

A very small portion of Joe Christmas’s blood is black blood, but he feels that this gives him a special advantage and a secret weapon. While being a blasphemer and an ingrate both seem as though they would be among the highest ranking of insults, Mr. McEachern would be even more appalled, angry and offended if he found out that his foster son was the slightest bit black, despite his white appearance. To Faulkner and to the rest of the country during the Civil War era, it was not only the color of a person’s skin that was of importance; just a drop of Negro blood could easily represent a reason for complete alienation and abandonment. We see this ideal emerge also in Absalom, Absalom! in Sutpen’s harsh judgment and rejection of Charles Bon.

“[Calvin Burden] had just turned twenty when he was killed in the town two miles away by an ex-slaveholder and Confederate soldier named Sartoris, over a question of negro voting” (248).

Here we learn that this story is inextricably linked with Faulkner’s short story, A Rose for Emily. Evidently, Calvin Burden (Joanna Burden’s grandfather) was killed by the same Colonel Sartoris that later granted Emily Rose the right not to pay town taxes. Faulkner routinely “reuses” his characters in different novels, but allows them to retain most of their old traits and principles for continuity. Quentin is a perfect example of character mobility, as we know that Faulkner was dissatisfied with Quentin in The Sound and the Fury and wanted to create a more plausible reason for his suicide, allowing him to also appear in Absalom, Absalom!.