This tactic, while sometimes frustrating, builds intrigue and engages the reader’s analytic functions. In fact, usually, the reader takes several pages to identify who the main actors are. Each chapter opens skillfully without obvious identification of the prime actors. The stories of Lena Grove and the Reverend Gail Hightower serve as bookends that intertwine with a central story of listless Joe Christmas. This story is reputedly one of the best novels in twentieth-century English and is structured as stories told from different people around one central narrative. It’s no wonder that a man such as he – despised by the whites around him and expected to be inferior (much like the Suffering Servant in Second Isaiah or Jesus in Roman Palestine) – would not respect societal rules. Although Joe Christmas ends up committing crimes, the reader cannot help but feel sorry for him and empathize with his alienation from the society around him. While Faulkner does not suggest that returning to slavery is a worthy option, he does portray Jim-Crow-era racism in a vivid light. He lacks a purpose and a stable societal structure around him. Joe Christmas (whose initials suggest that he is a Christ figure) is a restless African American male living a few generations after slavery. In it, he compares the plight of the American negro in the early-twentieth-century South to the sufferings of Jesus Christ while interweaving several points-of-view into a coherent tale. Light in August, one of Faulkner’s earlier works in Yoknapatawpha county, Mississippi, is no exception. Any work by William Faulkner is going to be heady, confuse sometimes, and be filled with long, descriptive prose.

Light august faulkner