Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Light in August, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Gender, and Transgression
Freedom, Discipline, and Violence
Names and Identity
Strangers, Outcasts, and Belonging
Haunting and the Past
Summary
Analysis
As an adult, Christmas has a clear memory of the day he “became a man.” He is eight years old, and sitting inside his stark, clean room in the house of his adoptive parents. His clothes are stiff, and his shoes clumsily polished. McEachern has instructed him to learn the Presbyterian catechism. Joe fails to memorize it, and McEachern insists he didn’t even try. McEachern gives Joe another hour. After half an hour, Mrs. McEachern stands in the doorway. She is a petite woman who looks much older than she is, and who is controlled by her “vigorous and ruthless husband.” Mrs. McEachern leaves without saying anything.
After being adopted and leaving the orphanage, Joe’s life has devolved into a grim, regimented existence. Everything in the house reflects McEachern’s cold, strict manner, from Joe’s stiff and uncomfortable clothes to Mrs. McEachern, who has been so thoroughly repressed by her husband that she no longer has much agency of her own.
Themes
After another half an hour McEachern returns and, having discovered that Joe still has not managed to memorize the catechism, he takes him out to the stable, making him bring the book with him. On the way Mrs. McEachern makes a weak effort to stop them, but they both ignore her. McEachern tells Joe to take off his pants, and he beats him with a leather belt. After ten strikes, he forces Joe to spend another hour memorizing.
This passage illustrates how religion, discipline, and violence were intimately intertwined in Christmas’s upbringing. Christianity here emerges as a system of control and oppression rather than a positive mode of being in the world. This helps explain why Christmas developed such an intense hatred of religion and killed Joanna when she tried to pray over him.
Themes
Once again, Joe does not recite it—and won’t speak at all—and McEachern beats him anther ten times. He repeats this process until Joe collapses, losing consciousness. Joe wakes up in his own bed, with McEachern sitting beside him. He tells Joe to get out of bed and kneel. McEachern prays, asking God to end Joe’s stubbornness. He then gets up and gives Joe the catechism once again.
The extreme violence of Christmas’s childhood gives a sense of how he himself came to be so cruel and violent as an adult. He never experienced any kind of love or care, even when being taught a religion that is supposed to be about God’s love.
Themes
On Sunday, McEachern drives to a church three miles away, leaving Joe and Mrs. McEachern at home. Before leaving, McEachern does not eat breakfast, although he prays and asks God for forgiveness for “the necessity of eating” anyway. Neither Joe nor McEachern eat lunch or dinner either. Joe does not know why, but he feels oddly peaceful. He lies in bed with his hands crossed over himself as if he is a dead body in a coffin.
Through the character of McEachern, the novel explores how Protestantism encourages adherents to shun all desires and pleasures. In this rather extreme example, this even includes the necessity of eating food. Joe’s sudden feeling of peace can be ascribed to the fact that denying his own need for food (and thus his dependence on the McEacherns) gives him a new sense of control.
Themes
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Mrs. McEachern brings a plate of food to Joe in bed, but he says he isn’t hungry. She assures him that her husband did not ask her to make it, at which point Joe sits up. He walks over and throws the food and dishes onto the floor, before getting back into bed. Mrs. McEachern then leaves. Joe is only eight years old at this point. It will take many years before the significance of this memory becomes apparent to him, when he remembers kneeling down to eat the food he dumped on the floor with his hands.
Joe attempts to show resistance to the cruelty of Mr. McEachern by rejecting the care of Mrs. McEachern. However, because he is only eight and thus essentially powerless, he can only act out through self-harm. The image of Joe eating the food he threw on the floor with his hands is heartbreaking, as it shows how alone and vulnerable he is.
Themes
One Saturday evening when he is fourteen, Joe stays out later than he is allowed. He will be whipped, but only because McEachern always whips him, regardless of whether he has done anything wrong. He is gathered with five other local boys outside a shed. A black girl is inside, and the boys have arranged to take “turns” with her. Joe goes inside. He immediately feels that there is something inside him that wants to get out. He can smell what he thinks of as “womanshenegro,” and can just about make out her eyes glowing in the darkness. He can feel the girl’s body and kicks her. She screams. They fight and Joe realizes that there are other people in there, other boys.
This passage provides a horrifying example of how, even though Joe is a young, vulnerable, and abused boy, as a white(-passing) person he still has almost limitless power over black people. Along with the other boys, he uses that power to abuse a girl, once again showing how cycles of abuse are perpetuated. However, it is not necessarily the case that the way Joe treats the girl is directly the result of his upbringing. The boys do not just harm her because they were harmed—they do it because they can.
Themes
Soon the boys forget about the girl altogether. One of them eventually tells Joe to stop hitting, saying that he can’t beat all of them and that they don’t want to fight him anyway. Eventually one pins him down, telling the others to leave. After the scuffle ends, the boys casually bid each other goodbye, telling Joe they will see him the next day at church.
This passage illustrates how senseless violence is braided into everyday life for Joe and the other boys. Yet it is also clear that Joe has a more aggressive, destructive personality than the others.
Themes
Back at home, Joe washes his face, which is cut and bruised from the fight. Seeing McEachern, Joe feels a strangely reassuring sense of familiarity about living with a man whose behavior is so predictable. He also thinks it’s ironic that he is going to be punished considering he avoided the “cardinal sin” (sex) that he might have committed in the barn with the girl. McEachern asks Joe what he was fighting about, and Joe gives vague and evasive answers. McEachern asks if Joe has “been to a woman,” and when Joe says he hasn’t, McEachern believes him, saying that Joe has never lied to him before. That night, Joe decides to run away. However, he doesn’t yet know that it is his body and the world that are the “cage.”
At the beginning of this passage, it seems almost as if Joe has developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome, taking pleasure in (or at least tolerating) the fact that McEachern’s abuse is familiar and predictable. However, by the end of the passage it’s made clear that his spirit has not been broken yet—he still dreams of escaping and making a better life for himself.
Themes
When Joe is eighteen, McEachern notices that Joe’s heifer is missing. Joe accidentally refers to the cow in the past tense, and McEachern is furious. The two of them set off to look for the cow. Joe points out that McEachern gave him the cow as a calf and that he raised her. McEachern replies that he did this to teach Joe about the responsibility of ownership. Joe admits that he sold the cow, again insisting that she belonged to him, so it was his right to sell her. McEachern agrees, and asks what price he got and what he did with the money.
This passage shows how cruel and counterintuitive McEachern’s parenting is. He claims to give Joe the cow in order to teach him responsibility, but in reality it is just another way to control him and, ultimately, an excuse to punish him.
Themes
McEachern asks if Joe asked Mrs. McEachern to keep the money safe for him and Joe, lying, says yes. However, McEachern knows it is a lie, because he has seen the new suit Joe bought for himself with the money. McEachern angrily declares that Joe has committed every one of the gravest sins. He hits Joe twice. After the second time, Joe defiantly tells McEachern not to hit him again. Later, Mrs. McEachern claims that she bought the suit for Joe with her butter money. McEachern replies that she is an even worse liar than Joe and forces her to pray for forgiveness.
Here the reader sees that McEachern’s cruelty extends not only to Joe, but also to his wife, who is kind enough to try and protect Joe, though even though this evidently a doomed endeavor. McEachern is clearly a megalomaniac who enjoys abusing the power he has over anyone in a weaker position than himself, and justifies this cruelty with religious piety.
Themes
Mrs. McEachern was kind to Joe from the moment he arrived at the house. That evening, now 12 years ago, she was waiting for him on the porch. She had practiced how she would lift him from the buggy and carry him into the house. At the time, Joe had never been held by a woman before. She washed his feet in a basin of warm water. This felt good, and Joe nervously waited for the moment when something bad would happen. Over the years she continued to care for him, secretly preparing him special dishes, and often (unsuccessfully) trying to keep him from being punished by redirecting blame to herself.
The description of Joe’s arrival at the house highlights the drastic contrast between the care he received up until the point of being adopted and the care Mrs. McEachern attempts to provide for him. Before meeting her, he had never even been held by a woman before, a detail that highlights the disturbing lack of love in Joe’s infancy and perhaps explains why he developed such intense brutality and misogyny later in life.
Themes
Sometimes Joe considers telling her the secret that he is black. This could serve as a “secret payment” for all the kind things she has surreptitiously done for him. He knows Mrs. McEachern’s secrets, such as the fact that she keeps a small tin of money she has saved hidden from her husband. Ultimately, however, Joe hates and resents Mrs. McEachern’s kindness, which he feels is a way to gain control over him. Even more than he hates the work, discipline, and violent punishment that make up life at the McEacherns’ house, he despises “the woman” who shows him love.
Abuse has prevented Joe from being able to accept kindness. Although Mrs. McEachern has been consistently kind to him, he still distrusts her altruism because he thinks it must have sinister motives behind it. This illustrates how he has become damaged by a lifetime of ill treatment.
Themes
