However, these impressions of Christmas are shown throughout the novel to be extremely biased and unreliable accounts.  About two years after Christmas begins working at the planing mill, the foreman hires an arrogant young man named Lucas Burch, who claims his name is Joe Brown, to help Christmas shovel the piles of sawdust.  The second chapter, where both characters are introduced, contains striking contrasts of the two men:

And they would be seen together down town on Saturday evening sometimes: Christmas in his neat, soberly austere serge-and-white and the straw hat, and Brown in his new suit (it was tan, with a red criss-cross, and he had a colored shirt and a hat like Christmas’ but with a colored band) talking and laughing. (Faulkner 36)

The bland clothing of Christmas when contrasted with Burch’s more vibrantly colored suit serves to illustrate the physical contrast seen by the townspeople.  Similarly, Byron, from whose perspective most of the descriptions of the two men are given, comments greatly on the difference between Christmas’s slow, methodical shoveling and Burch’s lazy demeanor that changes into hurried frenzy when he feels that a supervisor might be watching him.

            Despite these contrasting depictions of Christmas as the silent, statuesque worker and Burch as the flagrant playboy, the workers at the planing mill see them as mirror images of one another.  When Mooney, another worker at the mill, tells Byron that Burch and Christmas sell bootlegged whiskey on the weekends, Byron responds with disbelief.  Mooney responds by telling him, “That’s what Brown is doing.  I don’t know about Christmas…Brown ain’t going to be far away from where Christmas is at.  Like to like, as the old people say” (Faulkner 39).  Mooney’s characterization of Christmas and Burch as analogues demonstrates the unreliable view of them held by the townspeople.

Ironically, the citizens of Jefferson also compare their outcast minister, Reverend Gail Hightower, with Christmas after the latter escapes from the city’s jail.  “There were many reasons, opinions, as to why [Christmas] had fled to Hightower’s house at the last.  ‘Like to like,’ the easy, the immediate, ones said, remembering the old tales about the minister” (Faulkner 419). As dissimilar as Christmas and Hightower act and appear, they both hold outsider status in the small town, and are therefore synonymous, just as the town holds Burch and Christmas.  In this way, the townspeople attempt to thrust their vision of Christmas’s identity on him, and the narrator tries to thrust the townspeople’s perception of his identity onto the reader.

            Another important element in the identities of Burch and Christmas lies in their names.  Christmas received his name at the orphanage where he was found on Christmas Eve.  Though only three years old, the world has already robbed him of what every other child at the orphanage could already claim—a name.  A man named McEachern adopts Christmas and gives him his own name, which Christmas seems to initially accept.  However, when he meets Bobbie, the waitress and prostitute from the nearby town, she asks his name.  Christmas boldly declares, “It’s not McEachern…It’s Christmas” (Faulkner 173).  As Owen Robinson points out, this declaration serves as an acceptance by Christmas of his lack of identity.  Given the choice between the imposition of the nothingness represented by the name Christmas and the nothingness that McEachern’s religion gives him, Christmas keeps the name thrust upon him at the orphanage (Robinson 126).  Though he chooses the nothingness of this name, he does so because this lack of identity retains the only image of himself he has ever had.

What McEachern does not attempt to change makes more of an impression than that which he does.  The orphanage gives Christmas his first name, Joe, which McEachern never challenges.  This name, which society thrusts upon to Christmas as a substitute for an identity, finds reflection in Christmas’s partner.  As the novel opens, a young, pregnant woman named Lena Grove rides into Jefferson on a stranger’s wagon to find Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child.  While still in Alabama, Lena and Burch conceived the child, and Burch later departed for Mississippi to find work and start a home for them.  Once in Jefferson, Burch assumes the name Joe Brown to hide from Lena.  This choice of the same first name as Christmas illustrates the key difference between the two men.  David Frazier asserts that Byron, Burch, and Christmas exist in a triangular system of morality.  Byron chooses life and Christmas chooses death, whereas Burch chooses nothing (Frazier 418).  However, Frazier fails to comment upon the one choice that Burch does make, which is to assume his non-descript alias, Joe Brown.  When Byron first meets Burch, he comments upon the pseudonym Burch has chosen, stating that  “…looking at him, a man would know that at some time in his life he would reach some crisis in his own foolishness when he would change his name, and that he would think of Brown…as though the name had never been invented” (Faulkner 33).  Of course, Burch chooses an apt first name to accompany the unoriginal last name.  However, in order to shirk his responsibility to Lena and her baby, he consciously chooses the nothingness created by the name “Joe,” whereas Christmas has had this nothingness thrust upon him for thirty years.

Others also attempt to change Christmas through religion.  McEachern tries to take away the “heathen” name Christmas, Doc Hines, Christmas’s grandfather, attempts to end his life before it begins, having been born as “God’s abomination of womanflesh” (Faulkner 353), and Joanna Burden threatens Christmas with a gun in order to make him pray with her.  Michael Lackey’s study of the God-Concept demonstrates how each of these characters invokes this idea to try to control Christmas.  Each speaks calmly as they demand actions from Christmas, stating that a higher power commands Christmas to behave the way that he or she desires  (Lackey 77).  As Burden points her cap-and-ball revolver at him, demanding that he kneel to speak with God, she says, “I don’t ask it.  It’s not I who ask it.  Kneel with me” (Faulkner 267).

McEachern repeats this invocation of God as the justification for his actions.  When McEachern whips Christmas as a boy for not having learned his catechisms, he does so stoically.  Christmas eventually passes out, and when he awakes, he lies in bed and notices the impression of McEachern’s knees in the carpet where he has been praying.  McEachern comes into the room soon after and commands Christmas to kneel with him.  After Christmas has done so, McEachern begins to pray in a “droning, soporific, monotonous” voice, and asks “that he be forgiven…for lifting his hand against a child…who was dear to God” and that “the child’s stubborn heart be softened and that the sin of disobedience be forgiven him also” (Faulkner 143).  By committing these actions in the name of God, McEachern assumes a state of religious, and therefore moral, superiority over Christmas, just as Burden does when she commands him to pray.  McEachern then uses this notion of superiority to forcefully change Christmas’s identity.

The savage beating that he receives, however, hardly compares with the final attempt to shape Joe Christmas.  Having escaped from prison, Christmas flees to Rev. Hightower’s house, where Percy Grimm, captain of the State National Guard, guns him down.  In another illustration of the fallacy of public opinion, suggestion has led to reality, and the townspeople believe that Christmas raped Burden before murdering her.  As Grimm’s men enter the room, they see him standing over Christmas, having castrated the dying man, so that he would “leave white women alone, even in hell” (Faulkner 439).  Much like Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Christmas has been found guilty of a crime that he has never committed and therefore has been emasculated.  James Lee Spenko finds this ending inevitable because the line of brutality begun by Doc Hines could only have reached crescendo at Christmas’s death (Spenko 255).  However, the castration is also inevitable because the act completes the cycle begun at Christmas’s birth, wherein every person throughout his life attempts, often quite violently, to shape his identity.  By accepting the popular concept that Christmas raped Burden, Grimm creates Christmas in his own view, but by castrating him, he, at least in his own mind, shapes Christmas’s identity for eternity.

The often-abusive cycle of marginalization in Light in August has found repetition throughout much of Faulkner’s work.  Lee Goodwin finds himself marginalized for a crime that another man committed on his property in Sanctuary.  The Compson family castrates Benjy in The Sound and the Fury because they are afraid he might rape someone, despite that he has no recognition of his sexual identity.  Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, therefore, consists of citizens who bestow the status of outsider on anyone who differs from themselves, regardless of the magnitude of distinction.  Christmas typifies this marginalization as he struggles through his quest for self-identity.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William.  The Sound and the Fury.  New York: Random House, Inc., 1968.

Frazier, David L. “Lucas Burch and the Polarity of Light in August.” Modern Language Notes 73.6 (1956): 417-419. JSTOR. UT Arlington Library, Arlington, TX. 28 Sept. 2007 <http://www.jstor.org>.

Lackey, Michael.  “The Ideological Function of the God-Concept in Faulkner’s Light in August.” Faulkner Journal 21.1 (2005): 66-90. MLA International Bibliography. UT Arlington Library, Arlington, TX.  29 Sept. 2007 <http://search.ebscohost.com>.

Morrison, Kristin.  “Faulkner’s Joe Christmas:  Character Through Voice.”  William Faulkner’s Light in August:  A Critical Casebook. Ed. Noel Polk.  New York:  Garland Publishers, Inc., 1982.  143-169.

Robinson, Owen.  “’Liable to be anything’: The Creation of Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in August.”  Journal of American Studies 37.1 (2003): 119-133.  MLA International Bibliography.  UT Arlington Library, Arlington, TX.  29 Sept. 2007 <http://search.ebscohost.com>.

Spenko, James L. “The Death of Joe Christmas and the Power of Words.”  Twentieth Century Literature. 28.3 (1982): 252-268.  JSTOR. UT Arlington Library, Arlington, TX. 29 Sept. 2007 <http://www.jstor.org>.