In the novel “Light in August” by William Faulkner, the conflicts experienced by Joe Charismas as well as his personal qualities are used by the author to unfold the theme of fatal tragedy, loneliness, and alienation in the world full of hostility. Joe Christmas is undoubtedly a tragic character and can be regarded as an antisocial element – a thief, a killer, and a smuggler. Although it is possible to perceive him as a bad person, the analysis of Christmas’ character and the adverse episodes, in which he is represented as the main actor, reveal that he is not more than a victim of the unfavorable social environment and his own controversial nature which he is incapable of coping with.
The life of Joe Christmas is literally strung on the categories others try to assign to him and which he is obliged to follow – “part nigger” (Faulkner 38). His mother was eighteen years old when she met a man from a traveling circus. She told her father that the man was a Mexican, but the old man “knew somehow that the fellow [Christmas] had nigger blood” (151). Joe Christmas was not born as a black person, yet he needed to find out why he was considered a black man. The label “nigger” was prepared for Joe before his birth. Thus, when he was a child, he commenced to ask complex questions and wonder how this non-white part of his individuality, the presence of which he cannot prove or disprove, is woven into his life.
Initially, Christmas fluctuates between the races as he vaguely realizes that the white and the black blood is mixed in him, and attempts to achieve salvation trying to live according to the inner call of the soul. However, this call of his mixed blood provokes multiple internal conflicts which lead the character to self-destruction. Christmas could find salvation in the renunciation of all forms of kinship, but he feels an implicit, subconscious attraction to his informal blood brothers although they consider him a white man and cast him out when Christmas appears in the black neighborhood. At the same time, Joe hates white people, and this hatred motivates him to commit two murders. In this way, Joe Christmas can be regarded as a symbol of a tragic restlessness, riot, challenging the spiritual constraints, and subconscious revenge to the world that caused many suffering befallen on his black ancestors through the fault of white people.
Christmas is the prisoner of his awful memories about his wrecked life full of deprivations and humiliation. But this “nigger bastard” also serves as a keeper of collective memory transferred by past generations, although he does not understand why the aggression and rebelliousness boil in him (Faulkner 52). But the answer to Christmas’ questions is formulated by Miss Burden, his last victim, in her monolog about “the black shadow in the shape of a cross” which falls on the faces of all white newborns destined to be crucified on that cross (Faulkner 104).
As if supporting the truth of these prophetic words, Joe Christmas, “the volitionless servant of the fatality,” voluntary gives himself into the hands of his executioners. His death was not just the final episode of a miserable and sinful life. He was killed by the heritage which constituted his controversial nature – “all those successions of thirty years before that which had put that stain either on his white blood or his black blood” (Faulkner 181). He was killed by the history that left his urge for present self-conscience unfulfilled.
Works Cited
Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1972. Print.