Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsOriginal Title “Dark House”
Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2021
Faulkner started with “Dark House” for the title of the manuscript and ended with “Light in August”. These following characters fill the novel and its indelible story.
Hightower serves as someone caught between the forces of light and darkness. His sense of light is a suspended theological world that sees suffering as inevitable as the close of a day, the only secure place he has to his demons. As a dismissed minister he is powerless in his community to a all but a few, and to them his inability to act proves emblematic of his need for darkness, and his desire to dwell in isolation of phantasmagoria. Those seeking light are the ones that are rising out of the darkness of the Old South, encased in ebony that shines for some in ways that no whites can bare to witness, or in ways that mark the ages of suffering and a witnessing that long to move past and on to a better and well considered future. Hightower has neither a presence or a future, only a past that haunts one and shuts out the other.
But Lena is the essence of pure becoming as she walks on with an assured presence and a hope for a future with herself and her child, a future that Bryon a man of limited imagination but steadfast want and need to push that aside for his devotion and care with someone with a mesmerizing being.
Finally, Joe Christmas’s life, the central point of the novel, is an accepted struggle and sacrifice of a man of mixed race; it’s here were the light fades to darkness for all to remember as they seek out their next moments of light. He’s less of a spirit than a sad commentary and polemic of the the burden and sin of the South.
