Set in the post-Reconstruction South and focusing on the social interactions between white men and women and black men and women, William Faulkner’s Light in August explores the idea of the outside world’s contribution to a person’s identity. As his life progresses, Joe Christmas, a man with supposed black parentage, faces people claiming he is black and imposing. Although Uncle Doc Hines uses his incoherent stories to attest to Joe’s black parentage, Faulkner gives no sufficient evidence that Joe has any black blood in his body; yet, all the characters believe he does. Joe’s encounters with other characters bring him to the conclusion that he is partially black and force him, along with the reader, to further rely on the opinions of the people around him and the community to formulate his identity. By focusing on how the outside world poses racial opinions onto Joe Christmas and forcefully shapes his identity, Faulkner demonstrates how a person’s identity heavily relies on external thoughts and ideas. Starting in his early childhood, staff and other children at his orphanage ensure Joe knows what they think of him and are quick to …show more content…
McEachern attests that Joe’s history is “no matter” and that he has “no doubt that with us he will grow up to fear God and abhor idleness and vanity despite his origin,” he instills notions that Christmas is both an animal and property (143). This is evident from the first encounter Christmas has with his foster father at the orphanage. Mr. McEachern is observing Joe with “the same stare with which he might have examined a horse or a second hand plow, convinced before hand that he would see flaws, convinced before hand that he would buy” (142). Again, this reminds Christmas that he is both property and animalistic, both attributes of the newly freed slaves following the war. Even though McEachern has no knowledge of Christmas’s origins, he still imposes the notion that Christmas has black parentage and is