Light In August Literary Analysis

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

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