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Light In August Research Paper

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The past has always and will always influence the present in some way. Assume every life is a road trip in a car. The past might be a passenger, riding quietly in the backseat; it might be the car itself, a steel cage for what is always too long; or it might be a hijacker who locked all the doors and took off full speed ahead. While this is an underlying truth in many novels, in Light In August, William Faulkner uses three specific characters, Lena Grove, Reverend Gail Hightower, and Joe Christmas, respectively, to exemplify these universal states of being. These characters serve to demonstrate the way in which the role of the past regulating the present is in the fundamental nature of life.
First, I need to define how I see each of these circumstances …show more content…

The past has not just directed him to his present but continues to make his decisions on behalf of any underlying personality. This is reminiscent of Jay Gatsby. At a glance, Jay Gatsby and Joe Christmas have nothing in common. Gatsby is wealthy, successful, and the center of parties in Long Island; Christmas is poor, isolated, and unable to establish a place in society for himself. However, underneath the facade that Gatsby exudes, he and Christmas are peculiarly similar. They are both alone, without anyone who particularly cares for them or cares for their existence. Their behavior is analogous, both somewhere on the edge of mental collapse, the difference being that Christmas eventually collapses further than Gatsby does. Most importantly though, their pasts are the controllers of both of their …show more content…

“It seemed to him that he could see himself being hunted by white men at last into the black abyss which had been waiting, trying, for thirty years to drown him and into which now and at last he had actually entered, bearing now upon his ankles the definite and ineradicable gauge of its upward moving” (134). The feeling of isolation that had been growing for his entire life, of both his own creation and of those around him, finally implodes into chaos. The events of his past, those that formed a hateful, unloving and unlovable, animalistic being that meets his end in

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