Light in August
William Faulkner (1932)
“A man who might be Black, might be white, and will never be allowed to be neither walks into a town that will destroy him for the ambiguity it cannot tolerate.”
Character Analysis
Joe Christmas is American literature's most devastating study of a man destroyed by categorical ambiguity. Abandoned at an orphanage on Christmas Eve (his name is an accident of the calendar), he may or may not have Black ancestry — his grandfather Doc Hines believes he does, but no evidence is ever confirmed. Joe's entire life is shaped by this uncertainty: raised by a white Calvinist who beats religion into him, moving between Black and white worlds as an adult, accepted fully by neither. He is not a tragic mulatto in the nineteenth-century literary tradition — he is something more radical: a man whose race is never established, whose destruction comes not from what he is but from the South's inability to tolerate what he might be. His murder of Joanna Burden is an act of violence produced by a lifetime of categorical violence done to him. His death at Percy Grimm's hands — shot and castrated — is a lynching performed by a community that needed his body to confirm its own racial certainties.
Minimal speech, long silences, eruptions of violence instead of articulation. When he does speak, the sentences are short and hostile