"light in august" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Lena's arrival changes Byron's hitherto solitary life. As soon as he sees Lena, he falls in love with her. Byron is upset when he realizes that the man Lena seeks is a disreputable bootlegger known in Jefferson as Joe Brown. Taking responsibility for Lena's welfare, Byron finds her a place to stay in a cabin on the outskirts of town. And to better care for Lena, Byron leaves his rented room and moves to a tent next to Lena's cabin. When Lena is about to give birth, Byron goes for a doctor. But he first sends his one friend, Reverend Gail Hightower, to help deliver the baby if the doctor is late. The doctor is indeed late, and Hightower successfully delivers a healthy baby boy.

Lena is the center of Byron's life, but she has refused his offer of marriage. Nevertheless, Byron selflessly arranges for the sheriff to bring Lena's runaway lover (Lucas Burch, alias Joe Brown) to her cabin. When Burch/Brown flees by the back door, Lena has to start her search again. This time, though, Byron is accompanying her. He hopes that she'll marry him some day after all.

* * *

Doc Hines suspects that his daughter Milly's lover is part black. So he kills the lover and deliberately lets Milly die in childbirth. On Christmas day Hines leaves Milly's child on the steps of an orphanage. The orphanage staff names the child Joe Christmas.

At the age of five Joe sneaks into the dietitian's room to eat some of her sweet-tasting toothpaste. The dietitian finds him hiding there and thinks that he has been spying on her lovemaking. Afraid of little Joe, she informs the orphanage matron that Christmas may be part black. The other children have been calling him "nigger." The matron arranges for Christmas to be adopted by a sternly religious farmer and his wife.

Three years later, Joe Christmas begins to rebel against that farmer, Simon McEachern. Despite repeated beatings, the child refuses to learn his catechism. The cycle of defiance and punishment continues until Joe's life with the McEacherns ends in a violent confrontation over Joe's first love affair. His girlfriend, Bobbie Allen, is a prostitute and a waitress at a seedy diner in town. When Joe sneaks out one night, his self-righteous father searches for him and finds him with Bobbie at a dance. After McEachern hits Joe, Joe strikes McEachern with a chair.

Believing he has killed McEachern, Joe wants to run away with Bobbie. But when he arrives at the diner, she is hysterically afraid and angry. She calls him a "nigger," then watches as her friends beat Joe up. Bobbie and her friends leave Joe lying semiconscious on the floor.

After these unhappy experiences, Joe spends fifteen years wandering from city to city. Wherever he goes, he struggles with his uncertain racial identity. When he arrives in Jefferson, he meets Joanna Burden, the only remaining member of a family of abolitionists, people who fought to end slavery. Joanna lets him stay in an old slave cabin on her property and leaves food for him in the kitchen of her own house. One night he enters her bedroom and forces himself on her. He does the same the next night, but then for six months thereafter the two ignore each other entirely.

Suddenly Joanna's attitude to Joe changes. She becomes sexually passionate about him, to a degree that frightens Joe. But almost two years later, a third phase of their relationship gradually begins. Joanna loses interest in sex. Discovering that she is entering menopause, Joanna turns to religion, as if trying to atone for her wildness. She asks Joe to declare himself a black and to work in a black law firm. The idea revolts him. When Joanna asks him to kneel and pray, he refuses. She points a gun at him, but he kills her first.

The town of Jefferson knows nothing of Christmas's upbringing nor of his relationship with Joanna. To the townspeople he has been a mysterious stranger. Then Joanna's body is found, and based on the accusations of Christmas's companion, Joe Brown (Lena's Lucas Burch), the people now regard Christmas as a "nigger murderer." They send a posse to chase him through the woods. He eludes the posse but decides to let himself be captured. Doc Hines and his wife hear of the arrest and travel to Jefferson. Doc is eager to have Christmas lynched, but his wife tries just as hard to save Joe.

Meanwhile, Christmas escapes from custody. Pursued by a National Guardsman named Percy Grimm, Joe runs to Hightower's house, where he beats Hightower and barricades himself in a room. When Grimm arrives, Hightower tries to provide Joe with an alibi for the night of the murder. Ignoring Hightower, Grimm shoots, then castrates Christmas.

* * *

Gail Hightower was once a minister in Jefferson, but his sermons focused more on the gallant death of his Confederate grandfather than on God. The townspeople found him strange, and, when his wife died in scandalous circumstances, his congregation forced Hightower from his church. For years now, he has lived in isolation.

Hightower's one friend in town, Byron Bunch, keeps him informed about both Lena Grove and Joe Christmas. When Byron meets Mrs. Hines, Joe's grandmother, he brings her to Hightower. They ask Hightower to give Christmas an alibi by saying that Christmas was with him on the night of the murder, but Hightower refuses. Later, though, he complies with Byron's request to help Lena Grove when she is in labor. By successfully delivering her baby, Hightower finally breaks out of his isolation. When the fugitive Christmas barricades himself in Hightower's house, Hightower offers the alibi he had refused before. His effort has come too late, however, and Christmas is killed.

Hightower thinks back on his life and on his obsession with his Confederate grandfather's violent death. He at last realizes that, as a result of that obsession, he had withdrawn from his wife. He recognizes his responsibility for his wife's death. But now he feels that he too is dying.



^^^^^^^^^^LIGHT IN AUGUST: JOE CHRISTMAS

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 urban alienation. He is almost constantly in conflict--with society, with the few individuals he becomes 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 inner turmoil and anti-social attitudes of his adulthood. Three factors are especially strong influences on him as he grows up: his encounters with women and sex, his abuse at the hands of religious fanatics, and his confused racial background.

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. But the relation of his youth to his adult personality remains open to varying interpretations. For example, Christmas rebels against his harsh religious upbringing. Yet he also absorbs many of the traits of his Calvinist adoptive father, Simon McEachern, and even of his more fanatical grandfather, Eupheus Hines. Like them, he is violent, and from Simon's beatings and Eupheus's berating he seems to have acquired a taste for punishment. His suspicion of sex and women may have some of its roots in McEachern's and Hines's more open hostility to women. And his hatred for his possible "black blood" could certainly be a seed planted by the racism of Hines's religious rhetoric.

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 townspeople 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 chose 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 whole life.

A third group of readers take quite seriously Christmas's claim that he made himself what he chose 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 else 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? What is your opinion? 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 his allowing himself to be captured suggests such 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 of the events in his life suggest analogies to Jesus. Some readers contend that Christmas's life, like Christ's, is one of suffering, sacrifice, and perhaps even redemption. Others suggest that the novel's Christ symbolism links Joe Christmas to a broader mythology of which the Christ story is only part. According to this view, Christmas, like Jesus, is one of many mythic heroes who dies a sacrificial death, but his story does not validate a specifically Christian view of the world.