Because of this, as I came upon the end of the novel, all I really had were the lingering shadows of my own emotions and impressions. While I was initially frustrated by the fact that the only thing I had to work with was this sense of curiosity and fascination as I kept revisiting certain passages of the novel, utterly unable to put into words as to why, this actually turned out to be a powerful driving force throughout the writing process. My emotional draw to this topic was what kept me motivated to hone my scattered thoughts and impressions into a rigorous analytical argument; after all, I was writing to address a question for which I myself really wanted to know the answer.
However, like the novel itself, my paper also needed to grapple with multiple tangled, interweaving themes, which presented a real challenge in terms of structuring a logical, coherent argument.
As someone who values clarity quite highly in their writing — but whose thoughts usually accumulate in jumbled piles — outlining was really vital for making sure that everything followed a clear logical structure, in which each piece of the argument extends the previous one and leads into the next. The end result is a paper that is coherent but not rigid; there is still plenty of room for interpretation and nuance for a novel as wonderfully rich and complex as this one.
It is not necessarily true that a short paper is always a more simplistic one. But how do you craft an effective short essay when you have many important ideas to cover? In her paper on Light in August , by William Faulkner, Nina grapples with this challenge, weaving an argument that explains the complex dichotomy between spirituality and savagery within Joe Christmas.
Her essay first introduces surface-level characteristics, describing the brutal and savage character with which Christmas is frequently attributed. In order to craft an effective essay that can fully argue and support this thesis, she needed to ensure that each of her body paragraphs was consistently driving towards the conclusion that her thesis statement was indicating.
But I'm not Jewish. Just call it Irish-American blarney with a bit of a Cracker twist and a streak of red over my shirt collar. After all, I'm from Alabama. The truth of the matter is there's been worse hacks than me that tried to take a hatchet to William Faulkner. It's hard to believe any man could be that damned good.
Some men, critics for the most part, just can't live with how good he is. So they say he isn't. But I'm in Oxford, Mississippi this morning. What Oxford hasn't torn down and replaced with high rise apartments and condominiums still leaves traces of William Faulkner that are there for anyone to see if they take the time to look for it. Last night I met a lovely young woman and her mother over at Square Books. They were down from Joplin, Missouri, for the daughter to take the tour of Ole Miss.
She's already been accepted at the University of Alabama, but she thought she should take the Ole Miss tour. Where you meet the most interesting people in Oxford We met in the Faulkner section.
They were there first. Both were lovely. The daughter was seventeen. Her mother was graced with a timeless beauty that must give her daughter a good deal of satisfaction at what she has to look forward to when she takes a hard look in the mirror in forty years or so. You're not. I never step between a young woman and William Faulkner. It's always nice to see.
Wherever you go to school, you'll want them. I'll read them too fast and I won't get what I need to get out of them. I kind of let out a sigh, and sat down in one of those big easy chairs, conveniently placed by all the works of Faulkner and the many references published by various scholars through the Ole Miss Press.
Didn't fit in? I figured it was a safe bet she remembered being fifteen pretty well. Fifteen year olds get not belonging anywhere. I saw her mother smile. Hasn't everybody? That copy of 'Light in August' you're holding there.
It's all about that. Nobody in that book belongs where they ought to be. I told her about Joe Christmas, left on the step of an orphanage on Christmas morning, beaten by his foster parent because he couldn't learn his catechism.
I told her about Joanna Burden being a Yankee from an abolitionist family who was never welcome in Yoknapatawpha County. And I told her about Preacher Gail Hightower whose wife left him and then committed suicide and how his own congregation wished he wasn't the man in the pulpit. I asked if she knew what light in august meant. She shook her head no. I told her how livestock dropped their young in August. And I asked her if she'd ever seen those few days of peculiar light on an August day when the shadows were at their deepest and just before dark, before the shadows turned to black how everything flashed gold for just a few seconds, so fast, if you weren't looking for it you would miss it.
She hadn't noticed. I told her when she lived some more years she would see it. There was a tear in her mother's eye.
I wondered if she still hadn't seen it. Tell me about William Faulkner. I told her about how he wanted to go to war. How he lied about being shot down.
I told her about Estelle, how he loved her, how he lost her, how he got her back and then wished he hadn't. William and Estelle Oldham Faulkner, who called the quality of the light in August to her husband's attention I told her to read, read everything--that Faulkner said that.
I told her how he checked mysteries out out of Mac Reed's Drug Store and people started stealing his check out cards because they figured his autograph would be worth something one day.
We ended up laughing and talking a good while. If I went to Ole Miss, would you be one of my professors? Maybe it's the old cardigan sweater with the leather buttons. Maybe it's the white beard. I don't know. It happens a lot, though. I grew up and became Gavin Stevens. I'm a lawyer. We exchanged pleasantries, information. I told her mother that if her daughter ended up in Tuscaloosa, she could always call me. The daughter left with "Light in August," and "Absalom, Absalom.
You sold that Faulkner. I sold HER on Faulkner. There's a difference. You should have been a professor. Maybe so. But everybody's gotta be somewhere, whether they fit in there, or not. Well, it's Store opens at nine.
They want me in the Faulkner section today if I can stop by. I could use another cup of coffee. Dedicated to the memory of Miss Maxine Lustig, my guide to Yoknapatawpha County and many other wondrous worlds. Confession: I was hesitant to read this, but I was determined to make another attempt after a failed one several years ago when I picked up a copy of Absalom, Absalom! I am happy to say that this time around I was sold!
Light in August is not only accessible, in my opinion, but is also a remarkable work of fiction. This is what I would call Southern Gothic fiction at its finest. Jefferson, Mississippi in the s was rife with racism, misogyny and religious fanaticism. The depiction of every single character is striking. Their lives are tragic, lonely, and often violent. A man of mixed race, Joe Christmas is the epitome of a person consumed by an identity crisis.
He strives to find where he belongs, and in the process becomes completely alienated. He cannot find his place as either a black or a white man. Society feeds and inflames his feelings of alienation. Yet though he was not large, not tall, he contrived somehow to look more lonely than a lone telephone pole in the middle of a desert. In the wide, empty, shadowbrooded street he looked like a phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost.
Already, even before the falling horns had ceased, it would seem to him that he could hear the beginning thunder not yet louder than a whisper, a rumor, in the air. We must as a society strive to work harder on inclusiveness and acceptance of others. A teenager who seemed always cheerful and one whose goal was to make others laugh at his charming antics. He wanted to embrace others. Paul Bryant. All I knew when I started was that I wanted to give Faulkner another shot.
Many years ago I laboured heroically through The Sound and the Fury and I seem to remember I thought it was brilliant, but maybe that was just because I survived it. There are major problems with this novel. We get his whole life story. The big thing about Joe is his race - this is the Deep South and the s, after all. This is just a rumour, no one has any proof. He could and does live in white society without anyone raising an eyebrow. The only way people get to know he might be part black is that he keeps telling them.
They rear back in horror, they hiss, they throw him out with great force. There are around 1. No one bats an eyelid, nobody cares. So it seems to a modern reader as if Joe Christmas is suffering from an imaginary disease. If he just shut up about it, no one would know.
So he suffers horribly. Check this extraordinary passage : Because the black blood drove him first to the negro cabin. And then the white blood drove him out of there, as it was the black blood which snatched up the pistol and the white blood which would not let him fire it.
And it was the white blood which sent him to the minister, which rising in him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and all reality, into the embrace of a chimera, a blind faith in something read in a printed Book.
Then I believe that the white blood deserted him for the moment. I mean, WTF? At first you think hey, pages, this is so straightforward, I thought Faulkboy was supposed to be tough. And then everything screeches to a halt while a huge backstory is told in great detail. Then we shoot off on another entirely different story. Joe as a person who looks white but who is suspected of having black blood was exposed to his racial reality in a harsh manner through racist people whom he encountered.
This reality comes back through all his life to haunt him in several instances to constitute his paradoxical essence. Even worse, it was at the hands of his grand-father Doc Hines that Joe was psychologically harmed. He accepted it. Nevertheless, the conversation shows also his turbulence and the fact that he is presented as a trauma subject.
This reaction is detected in his observation and conversation with a black worker at the orphanage How come you are nigger? And the nigger said who told you I am a nigger, you little trash bastard?
When it comes to Joe Christmas, trauma for him is related to a theory of blood. In other words, sometimes the white blood drives him to pass as white. The accumulation of all the traumatic memorial events, which started with the toothpaste episode,leads Joe to manifest his violence and disdain toward women in a number of occasions including the prostitute Bobbie Allen and Joanna Burden.
The experience with Bobbie Allen was tormenting for him. He beats her when he learnt that she was having her period. Menstruation brings to his mind the scene of the dietician and its aftermaths. And not one was perfect […] there issued something liquid. In this case, trauma is due to sexual knowledge. It is too soon because it happens at prepuberty when the child cannot understand its significance and too late because the time when he grasps it, it becomes just a past experience Forter affirms also that Faulkner uses vomiting as an allegory for the dialectical intermingling of assimilation and rejection The sexual trauma was also manifested by Joe Christmas on Joanna Burden.
Like Joe who faces a racial trauma, this woman faces a gender trauma because she wavers between two gendered identities the masculine and the feminine. Indeed, Joe Christmas expels his sexual trauma toward this woman through repeatedly raping her. As a matter of fact, rape allows Joe to feel superior and to control the white female body. The action of rape aims at overcoming his own inferiority complex since being black equals having feminine attributes Forter Similarly, Lisa K.
Nelson points to this subversion of roles through referring to Joanna as the one acting the myth of the black rapist. As a result, Joe starts to think of running away and finds out that he was entrapped.
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