Light in August

by

William Faulkner

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Strangers, Outcasts, and Belonging Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Race, Gender, and Transgression Theme Icon
Freedom, Discipline, and Violence Theme Icon
Names and Identity Theme Icon
Strangers, Outcasts, and Belonging Theme Icon
Haunting and the Past Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Light in August, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Strangers, Outcasts, and Belonging Theme Icon

The most important characters in Light in August are all strangers or outcasts in some way. This becomes particularly pronounced due to the novel’s setting of Jefferson, Mississippi, a small town where belonging and conformity are highly prized. Yet while the strangers and outcasts in the novel are often villainized for the fact that they don’t belong, in reality their presence exposes that the veneer of conformity and belonging in Jefferson is actually an illusion. The painful tensions and divisions that exist between members of the Jefferson community mean that everyone ends up alienated from each other, no matter how much they strive to conform.

The importance of strangers and outcasts is introduced by Lena Grove, the first character to whom the reader is introduced, who acts as a framing device. Lena arrives in Jefferson as both a stranger and an outcast. Barefoot, pregnant, and abandoned by her unborn child’s father, Lena shocks and baffles those she encounters on her journey to Jefferson. Her behavior is seen as inappropriate, and the reactions of those she meets suggests that Jefferson is a place where strangers and outcasts are uncommon, and where everyone conforms to the community’s norms.

However, the use of Lena as a framing device is actually misleading in this way. Jefferson is a community that likes to think of itself as coherent and conformist, but in reality, it is filled with strangers and outcasts.

The prevalence of strangers and outcasts in Jefferson shows that a person can be considered a “stranger” even in the community in which they were born. This becomes especially clear through Joanna Burden, who is described as follows: “She has lived in the house since she was born, yet she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction.” Later, Joanna says of herself: “They hated us here. We were Yankees. Foreigners. Worse than foreigners: enemies.”

These quotations show that the intensity of hatred white Southerners feel toward Northerners dooms Joanna to forever be an outsider in her own hometown. They also indicate that making Joanna feel like a stranger is a way of punishing her (and her family) for the transgression of supporting black people. Of course, the treatment Joanna receives is only a shadow of the kind of vitriol and alienation black people endure in the South. Although black Southerners were, like Joanna, born in the area and do not know another home, they too are treated as “foreigners” and “enemies,” permanently outcast from society by whites.

At the same time, to argue that black people are only or straightforwardly treated as strangers is too simplistic. Part of the resentment white Southerners felt to Northern “strangers” like Joanna’s family rested in white Southerners’ sense of ownership of black people. Still clinging to the social system of slavery, these Southerners felt that black people “belonged” to them and to the South, and that it was a violation for Northerners to arrive and attempt to support or influence black people.

The strange position of black people who are simultaneously treated as both strangers/outcasts and native/belonging to the South is further explored through Joe Christmas. Joe uses his identity as a “stranger” in Jefferson in order to pass as white. When Joe Brown decides to out Christmas as black, Brown declares: “Fooled for three years. Calling him a foreigner for three years, when soon as I watched him three days I knew he wasn’t no more a foreigner than I am.” Intriguingly, Brown argues that Christmas belongs to Jefferson/the South as much as he, a white man, does, and that this is evidence that Christmas is black. The strange logic here highlights the confusing, paradoxical position of black people who are treated as both strangers and natives to places like Jefferson.

Meanwhile, Joe Christmas’s own trajectory further confirms how race, and particularly uncertain racial identity, can hinder feelings of belonging. Raised by a white adoptive family, Christmas became convinced that he had black ancestry and decided to live in a black community, “shun[ning]” white people. The narrator explains that he wanted “to expel from himself the white blood and the white thinking and being.” However, this plan does not work, and Joe remains isolated and outcast. The narrator comments: “He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself.” This quotation indicates that Joe is doomed to be a permanent stranger and outcast because the racist society in which he lives distorts and corrupts a sense of belonging. Joe’s uncertainty over his racial identity prohibits him from feeling a sense of belonging anywhere; yet even if he was certain that he was black, he would still be treated as a stranger and outcast by white society. In this sense, Joe’s story confirms the idea that belonging and conformity are nothing more than an illusion. The tensions and divisions between people in communities like Jefferson—particularly those caused by race—alienate people from each other in such an extreme way that true belonging becomes impossible.

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Strangers, Outcasts, and Belonging ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Strangers, Outcasts, and Belonging appears in each chapter of Light in August. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Strangers, Outcasts, and Belonging Quotes in Light in August

Below you will find the important quotes in Light in August related to the theme of Strangers, Outcasts, and Belonging.
Chapter 2 Quotes

He did not look like a professional hobo in his professional rags, but there was something definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home. And that he carried this knowledge with him always as though it were a banner, with a quality ruthless, lonely, and almost proud.

Related Characters: Joe Christmas
Page Number: 31-32
Explanation and Analysis:

“His name is Christmas,” he said.

“His name is what?” one said.

“Christmas.”

“Is he a foreigner?”

“Did you ever hear of a white man named Christmas?” the foreman said.

“I never heard of nobody a-tall named it,” the other said.

And that was the first time Byron remembered that he had ever thought how a man’s name, which is supposed to be just the sound for who he is, can be somehow an augur of what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time.

Related Characters: Joe Christmas, Byron Bunch
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:

She has lived in the house since she was born, yet she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction.

Related Characters: Joanna Burden
Related Symbols: Joanna’s House
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘Go on. Accuse me. Accuse the white man that’s trying to help you with what he knows. Accuse the white man and let the nigger go free. Accuse the white and let the nigger run.’

[…]

‘The folks in this town is so smart. Fooled for three years. Calling him a foreigner for three years, when soon as I watched him three days I knew he wasn’t no more a foreigner than I am. I knew before he even told me himself.’

Related Characters: Lucas Burch / Joe Brown (speaker), Joe Christmas, The Sheriff
Page Number: 97-98
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

“You noticed my skin, my hair,” waiting for her to answer, his hand slow on her body.

She whispered also. “Yes. I thought maybe you were a foreigner. That you never come from around here.”

“It’s different from that, even. More than just a foreigner. You can’t guess.”

“What? How more different?”

“Guess.”

Related Characters: Joe Christmas (speaker), Bobbie (speaker)
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

And always, sooner or later, the street ran through cities, through an identical and well nigh interchangeable section of cities without remembered names, where beneath the dark and equivocal and symbolical archways of midnight he bedded with the women and paid them when he had the money, and when he did not have it he bedded anyway and then told them that he was a negro. For a while it worked; that was while he was still in the south. It was quite simple, quite easy. Usually all he risked was a cursing from the woman and the matron of the house, though now and then he was beaten unconscious by other patrons, to waken later in the street or in the jail.

Related Characters: Joe Christmas
Page Number: 224
Explanation and Analysis:

He now lived as man and wife with a woman who resembled an ebony carving. At night he would lie in bed beside her, sleepless, beginning to breathe deep and hard. He would do it deliberately, feeling, even watching, his white chest arch deeper and deeper within his ribcage, trying to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes, with each suspiration trying to expel from himself the white blood and the white thinking and being. And all the while his nostrils at the odor which he was trying to make his own would whiten and tauten, his whole being writhe and strain with physical outrage and spiritual denial.

He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself.

Related Characters: Joe Christmas
Page Number: 225-226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

They hated us here. We were Yankees. Foreigners. Worse than foreigners: enemies. Carpet baggers. And it— the War— still too close for even the ones that got whipped to be very sensible. Stirring up the negroes to murder and rape, they called it. Threatening white supremacy.

Related Characters: Joanna Burden (speaker)
Page Number: 249
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

The town looked upon them both as being a little touched—lonely, gray in color, a little smaller than most other men and women, as if they belonged to a different race, species—even though for the next five or six years after the man appeared to have come to Mottstown to settle down for good in the small house where his wife lived, people hired him to do various odd jobs which they considered within his strength.

Related Characters: Mr. Hines / The Janitor, Mrs. Hines
Page Number: 341
Explanation and Analysis:

Halliday saw him and ran up and grabbed him and said, ‘Aint your name Christmas?’ and the nigger said that it was. He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad. For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have been skulking and hiding in the woods, muddy and dirty and running. It was like he never even knew he was a murderer, let alone a nigger too.

Related Characters: Joe Christmas
Page Number: 350
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

“I dont want to visit nobody here. I’m a stranger here.”

“You’d be strange anywhere you was at,” the deputy said. “Even at home. Come on.”

Related Characters: Lucas Burch / Joe Brown (speaker), Burford (speaker)
Page Number: 426
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

The black blood drove him first to the negro cabin. And then the white blood drove him out of there, as it was the black blood which snatched up the pistol and the white blood which would not let him fire it. And it was the white blood which sent him to the minister, which rising in him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and all reality, into the embrace of a chimaera, a blind faith in something read in a printed Book. Then I believe that the white blood deserted him for the moment. Just a second, a flicker, allowing the black to rise in its final moment and make him turn upon that on which he had postulated his hope of salvation. It was the black blood which swept him by his own desire beyond the aid of any man, swept him up into that ecstasy out of a black jungle where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment. And then the black blood failed him again, as it must have in crises all his life.

Related Characters: Gavin Stevens (speaker), Joe Christmas
Page Number: 449
Explanation and Analysis: