Joe Christmas in Faulkner's Light in August

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Joe Christmas in Light in August, epitomizes modern human alienated from the community as well as the origins of good and evil which W·Faulkner notes.
Anyway in Light in August a central concern is with relation between man's social role and private being: Hightower as a failed minister who rots in quiet neglect and Hightower as a ruminative observer of human folly, Joe Christmas as a harried mulatto who starts life without even a name and Joe Christmas as a bewildered man struggling toward the rudiments of consciousness. The one character, Lena, in whom the distance between social role and private being is slight, necessarily emerges as a comic figure. She stands for the outrageous possibility that the assumption shared by Faulkner and his cultivated readers may be false:-the assumption that suffering finds a justification in the growth of human consciousness.
Like all of Faulkner's Negroes, Christmas is also seen mainly from outside, but he is so graphic a figure that in a sense this limitation is entirely satisfactory because the theme is based not on any general notions about novels or Negroes, but on the inner logic of Light in August itself.
I emphasize that Fulkner extents diverted attention from other substantial justifications for the title which appears within the novel as in that of images of a special quality of light which he had in mind.
In short, this then is Christmas' tragedy: it is not that he is always fatally driven to refuse and reject, but rather that he has been so formed, and deformed, by his experiences that violence and defiance are his only means of self-assertion the causes of his isolation.

목차 (Table of Contents)

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