LIGHT IN AUGUST
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his life, his grandfather's "glorious" death, his wife's desertion and
suicide--and finally and typically summing it all up into a stale
round of human illusion and defeat. Faulkner wishes us to under–
stand that Hightower finally cuts the gordian knot of his thoughts
when he delivers Lena's baby and is finally struck down by Percy
Grimm as he stands between him and Joe Christmas. But Hightower,
whether brooding out upon the street from behind the study window,
or sitting behind the green lamp in his parlor when he receives Byron
Bunch, his only visitor, enlarges the stillness, increases its weight, by
personifying what is immediately present in the book, and through–
out Faulkner's novels-the Southern effort to explain, to justify, and
through some consummation in violent physical action even to lighten,
the burden of this obsession with the past.
Hightower, by general consent, is one of the failures of the
book: he is too vague, too drooping, too formless, in a word too
much the creature of defeat and of obsession, to compel our
in–
terest or our belief. But this is so partly because Hightower is both
a surrogate figure for Faulkner's meditations and a kind of scape–
goat on whom Faulkner can discharge his exasperation with Southern
nostalgia and the endless searching in the labyrinths of the past for
the explanation of the Southern defeat and of the hold it keeps on
the descendants of the Confederate aristocracy. Hightower is a failure
because Faulkner both uses and parodies him. Because of the ab–
surdly literal symbolism of his name, his constant watchful position
behind the green lamp, his useless reveries, he is never on the same
scale as the other characters, who are equally obsessed by the past,
but who function on the plane of some positive action. Hightower
not only lives by his thoughts; he has no life but his thoughts. We
miss in him the life-like element of violence (the only possible end
to characters so entirely formed of reverie) that we find in Joanna
Burden's degeneration, in Joe Christmas's hatred, in Percy Grimm's
fanaticism, in Doc Hines's mania. Hightower, acting in various sec–
tions of the book as a foreground observer, brings to them not merely
a stillness but a deadness which intervenes between us and the other
characters. This shapeless, ghostly body of thought has its symbolic
place in the mind of Hightower. For just as his life is over, and he
has no function but to brood, so Faulkner has signified in Hightower
that wholly retrospective, watchful concern, not with the past but
