A Death in the Reverend's House: The Three-part Allegory in William Faulkner's Light in August

Abstract

A Death in the Reverend's House:The Three-part Allegory in William Faulkner's Light in August Brian K. Reed The exuberance of youth can become the sorrow of age. William Faulkner expressed this thought to undergraduate students at the University of Virginia when he said, there comes a time when you've got to live with [the cruelty one has done in one's youth], when you're too old and the fire which enables you to get a certain amount of hysterical adrenalic pleasure out of things like that is gone, and all you have left is to remember what you did and you probably wonder why in God's name you did things like that, and you have to live with it, and I think that quite often unexplained suicides go back to some man who has done something like that and he gets old, and he's got to live with it, and decides it's not worth living with it. (Faulkner, University 41) Though Faulkner was talking about Percy Grimm, a character in his novel Light in August, he expressed a truth that applies to more than any one character. In Light in August, living with his past is a torment the reverend Gail Hightower hopes never to endure. Alfred Kazin describes the past in Light in August as "a god-like force that confronts man at every turn with everything he has been" (262). Hightower's dread of this god-like force becomes a dread of his inevitable meeting with Joe Christmas, a character whose mysterious connection with that past will make it impossible for Hightower to forget. Though both characters have considerable development outside of the allegorical framework, the story of Gail Hightower and Joe Christmas is an allegory of the history of turn-of-the-century southern church leaders as they struggle to adjust to the South's slaveholding past. The past Hightower struggles to forget begins in his childhood, with troubled thoughts of his father. Because both he and his mother are ill [End Page 79] through most of his youth, Hightower develops an unconscious animosity towards his father, the only healthy member of the family. His father's good health makes him "a stranger to them both, a foreigner, almost a threat. … he was an enemy" (475). Searching for a reason to consciously justify his resentment, Hightower believes he finds one in the blue patch sewn into the frock coat he finds in a trunk in the attic. This coat, which his father wore as a chaplain to Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, captures the child's imagination so that he surmises with "a kind of hushed and triumphant terror" (469) that his father probably killed the man whose uniform supplied the patch. Hightower now regards his father with the horror he would have for a murderer. In his grandfather, killed in the Civil War years before the boy is born, Hightower finds the object of admiration he does not find in his father. The fantastic stories told by Cinthy, his family's Black cook and housekeeper, bring his grandfather to life for him. Unlike his father's frock coat, these stories, in which his grandfather kills Yankees "by the hundreds," bring no terror because the people in them "were just ghosts, never seen in the flesh, heroic, simple, warm; while the father which he knew and feared was a phantom which would never die" (477). Tales of his grandfather dominate Hightower's life so intensely that they become his personal mythology, or "a kind of revealed truth," as Olga W. Vickery calls it, "compounded of an old Negress' storytelling and his own boyish imagination" (Novels 77). As his grandfather gains actuality through these stories his father loses it, so Hightower decides he must have emerged directly from his grandfather, without his father's involvement. In fact, it seems to Hightower that his real life is the one he lives through his grandfather rather than through his own physical being. Hightower believes he "skipped a generation" and that he must go where his grandfather died, "where my life had already ceased before it began," and die...