On the one hand, Christmas runs away from his problems and reacts violently to his own discomfort. Joe Christmas is a character in search of himself – and who can't relate to that journey? Light in August presents a cautionary tale of proper and improper ways to find oneself. What is Light in August About and Why Should I Care? His work was so brilliant, in fact, that the good folks at the Nobel Foundation awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949. Once Sanctuary made it big, folks started realizing that Faulkner's other work was actually technically (and emotionally) brilliant. Sanctuary is a potboiler of a novel, one with lots of alcohol and sex and violence. Light in August was published after Faulkner gained a wide readership 1931, when he published Sanctuary. The so-called Yoknapatawpha novels are linked by their shared location, but they're also linked by certain themes and concerns, such as the legacy of slavery, the persistence of memory, and the South's struggle to come to terms with its defeat in the Civil War, among others. Like The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom, and As I Lay Dying, Light in August takes place in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County (say that five times fast). Published in 1932, William Faulkner's Light in August chronicles the life and death of Joe Christmas, a man of ambiguous racial ancestry.
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