William Faulkner's Light in August (1932) is one of his most searing and powerful novels. The novel has a complex structure, with interwoven narratives about two main characters: Lena Grove and Joe Christmas.
Lena Grove is a simple and naïve country girl from Alabama, who has a love affair with a drifter named Lucas Burch. Burch leaves her after she becomes pregnant, and she sets out to find him. She walks along the road, innocently trusting in the kindness of people she meets. After making a long journey, she arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi.
She has been told that a man named Bunch is working at the planing mill, and she goes there hoping to find Burch. She meets Byron Bunch, who immediately falls in love with her, although Lena is still in love with the drifter Lucas Burch. Byron Bunch finds a temporary home for Lena in a Negro cabin on the estate of the late Joanna Burden.
Lena, in fact, arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi on the day that Miss Burden’s house has been set on fire, and Miss Burden has been murdered. The drifter Lucas Burch had taken the name Brown, and had worked at the mill, but had quit his job to become a bootlegger with Joe Christmas, who had also worked at the mill, and with whom Brown had shared the cabin near Miss Burden’s house.
Brown is at first suspected of having committed the murder, and is thrown in jail. But Brown reveals that Joe Christmas is the murderer, and that Christmas has Negro blood, despite the fact that Christmas has been thought to be a white man. Brown attempts to collect the reward for the capture of Christmas, by helping the sheriff to track him down, but when Brown is brought back to the cabin, and is confronted with Lena and her newborn baby, Brown runs away, jumping aboard a train.
Meanwhile, Byron Bunch continues his courtship of Lena, and as the novel ends, Byron and Lena and her child leave Jefferson.
The other main character of the novel is Joe Christmas. Christmas is an outsider to society. Born an illegimate child, he is kidnapped by his grandfather, Doc Hines, who cannot bear the disgrace of having an illegitimate child in the family. Hines insists, despite his daughter’s denial, that the child’s father had Negro blood. Doc Hines disposes of the baby by leaving it anonymously on the doorstep of an orphanage on Christmas Eve. Thus, the boy is named Joe Christmas.
Doc Hines conceals his relationship to the child, and works as a janitor at the orphanage, so that he can encourage the other orphan children to call Joe a “nigger,” and teach Joe that it is a curse to have Negro blood.
As a child, Joe is adopted by a farmer named McEachern. Joe has white skin, and is thought to be white by McEachern. The stiff, self-righteous farmer is brutal and puritanical, and attempts to control the boy by a cruel and rigid discipline. Joe rebels, and at age seventeen has a love affair with a waitress. When McEachern discovers the boy and girl together at a dance, the farmer says that the girl is a harlot, and Joe breaks a chair over McEachern’s head.
Joe runs away, and drifts as far north as Chicago and Detroit. He travels south again, and returns to Jefferson, Mississippi fifteen years later. He works for three years at the planing mill, and then becomes a bootlegger of whiskey. He stays in an abandoned Negro cabin on the Burden plantation.
Miss Joanna Burden is a reclusive white woman, who is distrusted by the townspeople because she comes from a New England family, and because she is a descendent of Yankee abolitionists. Miss Burden tries to be sympathetic toward blacks, and donates money to Negro colleges, but she considers black people to be “the white race’s doom and curse for its sins.” Joe is able to take advantage of her, and they start to have sexual encounters on her plantation. Joanna Burden finds a twisted sexual pleasure in her relations with him. Eventually, she attempts to convert Joe to her religious beliefs, but when he refuses to pray, or to follow her plans for his future, she attempts to shoot him. Her pistol misfires, and he cuts her throat, and then attempts to conceal the murder by burning down her house.
Joe escapes from Jefferson, but then lets himself be captured. His grandparents come to Jefferson after they hear that he has been captured. Doc Hines wants to take revenge against him for killing a white woman, and attempts to stir up a lynch mob. Joe again escapes custody, and takes refuge in the home of Reverend Gail Hightower. He is then overtaken by his pursuers, and is mortally wounded by Percy Grimm, a captain of the local unit of the National Guard. The dying Joe Christmas is castrated by Percy Grimm.
A theme of the novel is the impact of the outsider on society. How a community responds to an outsider indicates whether the community is truly consistent with the values it says it wants to uphold. The acceptance or rejection of an outsider by a community forces it to decide on the values it will use to define itself.
The central character of the novel, Joe Christmas, is an outsider, because he is neither white nor black. He is trapped between trying to act as a white man, because his skin is white, and trying to act as a black man, because he has been taught that he is black. He follows a pattern of violent and self-destructive behavior, due to his lack of a sense of belonging in the community. He has been told that he is worthless and inferior, and that he is a curse to those around him, and thus he feels compelled to seek some form of self-punishment.
Joe Christmas is ruthless, cold, and sadistic. His name is ironic, because he lacks mercy or compassion; yet he reflects the community that has rejected him. He is placed in the position of being Christ, in that the community tries to release its intolerance, bigotry, and hatred upon him. But he is also, in some ways, an anti-Christ; in that when he encounters people who treat him with any degree of humanity, he releases his self-hatred upon them.
Other outsiders in the novel include Joanna Burden, a wealthy woman who has a Yankee background, and Reverend Gail Hightower, a fanatical preacher who is rejected by the community because his wife left him and killed herself by jumping from a hotel window.
Other themes of the novel include: the social assumptions about race that have influenced life in American society; the individual’s sense of alienation in a world of terror and violence; and the attempt to justify bigotry by religious fanaticism (the religious fanatics in the novel include Doc Eupheus Hines, Mr. McEachern, Reverend Gail Hightower, and Joanna Burden).