LIGHT IN AUGUST
527
is curiously soundless, for it is full of people thinking to themselves
about events past.
As
soon as Lena Grove arrives in Jefferson, at
the end of the first chapter, the story of Joe Christmas comes to us
through flashbacks, through talk by the other men at the planing
mill, through a whole chapter of summary biography, through ru–
mors and gossip by the townspeople, and at the very end, when
Joe Christmas's whole story is put together for us, by Gavin
Stevens's telling a stranger about the grandparents. Almost every–
thing we learn about Joe Christmas comes to us in the form of
hearsay, accusation, the tortured memories of others; even
his
death
is told as an incident in the life of his murderer, Percy Grimm. All
these reports about the stranger sufficiently suggest his alienation.
But in themselves they also create that stillness, that depth of medita–
tion into which all the characters are plunged.
This meditation begins in Joe Christmas himself, who
in
his
distance from other men is constantly trying to think himself back
to life, and who, without knowing exactly how his ordeal began–
and certainly not why-finds himself like a caged animal going over
and over the same ground. We hear him talking to himself, and we
follow his slow and puzzled efforts to understand the effect of his
actions upon others. We see him as a child in the orphanage, eating
the toothpaste, frightening the dietitian out of her wits because he is
staring straight at her, trying to understand what she is accusing
him of. We watch him walking the path between his cabin and
Joanna Burden's house for his meals, thinking out everything he
finds between the four walls of her kitchen. Finally we watch
him
running, and thinking deliriously in his flight, until, in that magnifi–
cent and piercing scene near the end of his flight, he falls asleep as he
runs. The pressure of thought, the torture of thought, is overwhelm–
ing-and useless, since Joe Christmas does not know who he is, and
so cannot locate the first cause of his misery. But still he thinks, he
broods, he watches, he waits. And it is this brooding silence in
him,
fixed in attention over he does not know what, that explains why
he is so often described in the book as looking like a man in prayer–
even like a "monk." There is a strange and disturbing stillness about
him that eases him, more swiftly than most men, into the stillness
of non-being.
The stillness of the book has, of course, an immense reverberation
