Light In August Literary Analysis

5 There are many different factors that determine what makes a person who they are. One of the most crucial factors comes from things that have happened in their past. Although these effects from the past can come not only from one’s personal past, but also from their family’s or race’s past. William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Ralph Ellison are all excellent examples of authors who utilize their characters’ pasts to develop substance. The past plays a huge role everyone’s lives and authors often use character backstories in their works in order to give readers a better understanding of why someone is the way they are or behaves the way they do. Joe Christmas, one of the characters followed in Faulkner’s novel, Light in August, is a …show more content…
This began during his childhood at the orphanage where at a very young age, he accidentally witnesses two adults, the dietician and a doctor, having sex. Upon discovering young Christmas had witnessed the affair, the female dietician developed a hatred for him. Fearing that he would reveal the secret, she began bullying him into keeping quiet, although he did not understand what he saw or why she was targeting him. At one point she screams in his face, “Tell, then! You little nigger bastard! You nigger bastard” (O’Connor 53). Later in life, Christmas is again mistreated by a woman when he is led on by a prostitute named Bobbie. She is the first woman, or really first person, he ever opens up to about him being biracial. “She asked him again. Then he told her. ‘I got some nigger blood in me’” (O’Connor 81). Despite this having been told in confidence, she later reveals it in a rage following when Christmas fought his adopted father at a dance, yelling, “[he] told me himself he was a nigger! The son of a bitch! Me f—ing for nothing a nigger son of a bitch that would get me in a jam with clodhopper police. At a clodhopper dance” (O’Connor 89). After this revelation, Bobbie allows him to be beaten to a pulp and then steals all of the money he had saved to run away with her. It was these negative instances that led to Christmas’ distrust and hatred of women, which materialized when he rapes and eventually murders Joanna Burden. Another flaw of Christmas’ is his violent tendency. He is seen getting into violent fights and harming other characters throughout the novel, from hitting Bobbie upon one of their first meetings to beating up Brown when he discovers Christmas’ affair with Burden. This obviously stems from his childhood with the McEacherns. His adoptive father Mr. McEachern was abusive toward Christmas since he was a boy, often