ipl-logo

Light In August Literary Analysis

1305 Words6 Pages

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 and self-perception. As his life progresses, Joe Christmas, a man with supposed black parentage, faces people claiming he is black, which correlates with being subhuman, and implanting ideas that his heritage controls who he is and how he will act. 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 …show more content…

After retiring to his room for the evening, Christmas “felt like an eagle: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong. But that passed, though he did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage” (160). While an obvious upgrade from a dog, Christmas’s description of himself as an eagle still recognizes him as subhuman, keeping him locked in his caged mindset of himself and prohibiting him from ever thinking otherwise about himself. Joseph Urgo similarly summarizes that “As a racially ambiguous body, it is his ‘nigger blood’ which condemns Joe in the white world…Joe Christmas can never be free of what, in his mind, his blood has made him be” (394). Urgo goes on to clarify how Joe’s enlightenment to menstruation causes further distress to his mental state and further alienates him from everyone else. He describes Joe’s point of view: “The ‘victims’ of menstruation are also the beneficiaries of what Joe understands to be a purifying ordeal, a monthly purging of ‘filth’ from the body, a periodic evacuation of the stuff of the body’s cultural definition, blood” (394). Urgo further explains “the blood in the male shape is trapped there, the ‘filth’ has no outlet” (395). To summarize these ideas, Christmas believes that since he cannot purge his body of his filthy blood as women do once a month, he is trapped with his blood and cannot escape it or what it forces him to

Show More
Related
477 Words | 2 Pages

One example of the racism he faces was when he was abused by the Amoses. The Dusky Devastators had a lot of trouble pulling in money during their shows because of the Great Depression. —------------------ Bud, the protagonist of the story, is a ten year old boy who is struggling with finding his family after his mother leaves evidence that he still has family left. Angela Janet Caldwell, Bud’s Mother, before the book starts when Bud was six years old. The Amoses adopted Bud when he was ten, but showed how cruel they could be when they locked Bud in the shed full of bugs for the night.

Read More
575 Words | 3 Pages

1920’s society offered a prominent way for blacks that look white to exploit its barrier and pass in society. Visible within Nella Larsen’s Passing, access to the regular world exists only for those who fit the criteria of white skin and white husband. Through internal conflict and characterization, the novella reveals deception slowly devours the deceitful. In Passing, Clare and Irene both deceive people. They both engage in deceit by having the ability to pass when they are not of the proper race to do so.

Read More
510 Words | 3 Pages

I had never thought of my skin, let alone considered it a mark of foreignness” (73). In the moment, he did not realize that because he was colored, he was any different. Just as the snow grayed and lost it’s purity, Medina felt as because he was also not pure white that he was looked down on. As Medina reflects on the situation, now as an adult, he understands what made him different. This story shows a different view of America that people do not typically see.

Read More
961 Words | 4 Pages

In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the narrator, James Weldon Johnson, makes the decision to live life disguised as a white man after seeing and experiencing the troubles that hound the African-Americans after the abolition of slavery. In Lalita Tademy’s Cane River, a slave family struggles to survive through their enslavement and the aftermaths of the Emancipation Proclamation. Throughout both of these stories, white people are disrespectful to the black people despite them deserving respect. Occasionally, this disrespect festers and turns into unjustified hatred. Through the gloom of death in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Cane River, one can see how prejudice is devastating to everything that stands in its path.

Read More
1987 Words | 8 Pages

Not to mention, the story starts off in a courtroom because Abner Snopes burned down the property of Mr. Harris. Mr. Harris is landowner, who is left with a burned barn and no legal option. Snopes is advised to leave the country because the court can’t find enough evidence to sentence him. His son Sarty Snopes chooses to warn the owner. “Barn Burning” offers a helpful picture of how Faulkner sees the economics of the postbellum South, where the poor whites remain the underclass rivals of black sharecroppers (Pierce).

Read More
878 Words | 4 Pages

Saad Moolla Ms. Noha Enligh III 15 January 2015 Literary Analysis Essay The play, “ A Raisin in the Sun” authored by Lourraine Hasenberry holds a very unique title that refers to Langston Hughes’s poem “A Dream Deferred.” Langston’s poem is about dreams and what happens to those dreams are not fulfilled. Hassenberry wrote her play about a poor African American family by the name of the Yongers. Mrs. Younger, Walter Lee, and Beneatha all have there own individual dreams.

Read More
756 Words | 4 Pages

In the novel Jasper Jones the protagonist Charlie is faced with racial aggravation towards his friend Jeffery and his family. As the story progresses, even though they seem small at the time, these racial stereotypes have cruel and unfounded aggravation. Silvey uses a range of language techniques to emphasise how unjustified the racial aggravation is. Jeffery is considered a racial outsider by the villagers and this is evident by the way they treat him.

Read More
271 Words | 2 Pages

In the second half of the novel, “Moonlight Shadow”, the theme of death and loneliness continues. For example, Satsuki jogged to the river where she and Hitoshi hung out, when she meets a woman named Urara. Urara tells Satsuki to come back to the river on a certain day because she will have “a vision...something that happens only once every hundred years or so.” On the appointed day, Satsuki returned to the river and witnessed an unbelievable vision: “There was HItoshi. Across the river, if this wasn’t a dream, and I wasn’t crazy, the figure facing me was Hitoshi.

Read More
469 Words | 2 Pages

Literary Analysis Suspense. It's what makes us sit on the edge of our seats at movies, or has us biting our nails as we read. It’s the backbone behind any classic horror film where the babysitter keeps getting unknown phone calls about checking the children and she asks the police to trace the call only to get a call back saying it's coming from upstairs.

Read More
1455 Words | 6 Pages

James Baldwin is an activist and writer that was born and raised in Harlem that stood for equality within the black community. Baldwin is the grandson of a former slave and was the oldest of nine children where he grew up in poverty. At the age of fourteen, he discovered his passion for writing and reading by his hobby was going to libraries. As year He published his first book in 1955 known as Notes of a Native Son. The novel Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin displays a collection of essays of where he critiques racism and examines the culture of Blacks in White America.

Read More
912 Words | 4 Pages

The John Griffin Experience In the 1950’s, racism was at its peak in the US. In the book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, he puts himself into a black man’s shoes to experience an everyday life of what it is like being of darker color. He takes it upon himself to seek medical treatment to change the pigmentation of his skin from white to black. After undergoing this treatment, he sets out to New Orleans to begin his life in darker skin.

Read More
1175 Words | 5 Pages

Language is used everyday in lives. We use it to communicate with each other to show how we feel or think. Comfort can drift away from us if we do not have the ability to communicate with others. Barriers can present themselves when trying to communicate inhibiting language. In the short story Out of All Them Bright Stars by Nancy Kress, she puts an alien in a normal dinner and everyone is uncomfortable with his presence there except his waitress.

Read More
1390 Words | 6 Pages

Racial tensions during the 1920s, in which “Incident” was written, were especially high, with a dramatic increase in membership of the KKK and Klan “manipulation of state and local politics” (3), an uptick in hate crimes, race rioting resulting in imprisonment or death for hundreds of black Americans, and the poor treatment of black soldiers coming home from WWI all contributing to one of the most racially charged time periods in American history. Despite racism being a daily and lifelong experience for the vast majority of African Americans during this time, Cullen depicts racism as solely singular throughout the duration of the poem, extending its singularity even to the title itself—“Incident.” So then, given the prevalence of racism at the time, why did Cullen make the decision to limit the experience to one isolated

Read More
671 Words | 3 Pages

The story represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Racism is so insidious that it prevents Richard from interacting normally, even with the whites who do treat him with a semblance of respect or with fellow blacks. For Richard, the true problem of racism is not simply that it exists, but that its roots in American culture are so deep it is doubtful whether these roots can be destroyed without destroying the culture itself. “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never looked "white" to me” (Wright 23).

Read More
1724 Words | 7 Pages

Along with the internal conflict, Christmas also faced an external conflict with Jefferson’s townspeople. Since he was a child, he experienced racial slurs and discrimination, which demonstrated the emotional abuse he experienced. In William Faulkner’s Light in August, the segregation and discrimination that was demonstrated throughout the novel exposes the physical and mental trauma African Americans faced during the 20th century. Contrary to many people’s beliefs, Light in August is not based off of Faulkner’s

Read More

More about Light In August Literary Analysis

Related Topics

Open Document