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A Critical analysis on the life of Joe Christmas in William Faulkner s Light in August Chris Clark English 11 Honors In William Faulkner s Light in August, religion plays a large part of the story, but an even larger part in the traits of the main characters and their actions and appearances. One of, if not the main characters of the novel is Joe Christmas, also known as Joe Mceachern. Part of the book tells of his childhood and young adult years. This paper will be based on the life of Joe Christmas; a critical analysis of how he came to be the rather disturbed being that he was. I will also look at several points of view of his character taking on a Christ-like character in the novel. Joe Christmas is a cold and hostile drifter of uncertain racial identity.
One of the most isolated characters in American literature, he has been viewed as an extreme example of modern alienation. He is almost constantly in conflict with society, with the few individuals he has come close to, and with himself. Christmas s dress-white shirt with black pants-suggests his internal division. And this divided character may even symbolize the racial conflict of the South as a whole. But Faulkner s detailed account of Christmas s infancy, childhood, and adolescence shows that Joe wasn t born with the internal and anti-social attitudes of his adulthood. Three factors are especially present as he grows up; his encounters with women and sex (mainly the toothpaste scene), his abuse at the hands of religious fanatics, referring to his time at the orphanage with Hines and later in his life with Mceachern, and his confused racial background, due of course to the unknown origin of his birth throughout most of the novel.
Faulkner shows Christmas changing from a trusting young child, to an angry and withdrawn adolescent still capable of some love. And finally to an adult at war with everyone, even the completely willing and accepting sexual partner he finds in Joanna Burden. But the relation of his youth to his adult personality remains open to varying interpretations. For example, Christmas rebels against his Calvinist adoptive father, Simon Mceachern, and to his even more fanatical grandfather, Euphues Hines.
Like them, he is violent, and from Simon s beatings and Euphues berating, he has appeared to acquired a taste for punishment. His suspicion of women and sex may have some of its roots in Mceachern and Hines s more open hostility to women. His hatred for his possible black blood could certainly be a seed planted by the racism of Hines s religious rhetoric, which was often times based negatively against blacks and their ways. Christmas is a remarkably controversial character.
For some readers Joe is, above all, a victim; of Hines, of the orphanage dietitian, of Mceachern, and of the waitress-prostitute Bobbie Allen. According to these readers, Joe also falls victim to Joanna Burden, who responds to him not as a distinct individual, but as a member of a category; the Negro race. And finally and most importantly, Joe is a victim of racist mythology. In order to keep blacks in an inferior state, many white Southerners convinced themselves that blacks were a threat to white women. Consequently, once Jefferson hears that Christmas is part black, the towns people assume that he is guilty. He becomes a scapegoat whose guilt reaffirms the community s racial stereotype.
Readers who see Christmas as above all a victim, point to his statement that all he wanted was peace. But they tend to disregard his other statement, that he made himself what he wanted to be. Some readers though, don t, believe either remark. For them, Joe is primarily a victim of his own obsessions rather than of other people. Unaware of his own motivations, he lurches from one confrontation to another and finally to his own destruction, which is the logical conclusion to the self-destructive pattern of his own life. A third group of readers take quite seriously Christmas s claim that he made himself what he close to be.
For them, he is the novel s only hero. They find his refusal to belong to either of society s racial categories an act of rebellion against an order that no one in the novel questions. But it s difficult to square such an interpretation with Christmas s own racism and hatred of blacks. Does he refuse to accept the two racial categories, or does he just zigzag back and forth between them? Are all three interpretations necessarily mutually exclusive? However you see Christmas, you will want to consider whether he changes at the end of his life and comes to some new understanding.
You might argue that for him to be captured suggested a change. But you could also argue that this action represents a final defeat or even that it simply repeats his usual self-destructive pattern. Christmas s name and several events in his life suggest analogies to Jesus. Some readers contend that Christmas s life, like Christ s, is one suffering, sacrifice, and perhaps even redemption. Others suggest that the novel s Christ-like symbolism links Joe Christmas to a broader mythology of which the Christ story is only a part. According to this view, Christmas, like Jesus, is one of many mythical heroes who dies a sacrificial death, but his story does not validate a specific view of the world.
The seemingly fatherless birth of Joe on Christmas Eve, on the orphanage doorstep, is another obvious relation to his appearance as a Christ-like figure. Finally the mutilation at his death by Percy Grimm is very much in resemblance to the glory of Jesus in the cross. Yet still other readers can t attribute either of these meanings to the life of such a tormented and tormenting man. Some of this group see the Christian symbolism as an ironic way of pointing out the emptiness of Joe s sacrifice; others see it as it an equally ironic way of indicating the Christian fanatics who crucify scapegoats; and still others see it as an empty and arbitrary analogy that the novel doesn t need.
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Research essay sample on Light In August Joe Christmas
