This paper analyzes in detail a passage from A Light in August by William Faulkner, the plight of Joe Christmas from what would have been his first sexual encounter.
The paper states that this selection relations to the novel as a whole and provides immense awareness of the character of Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s `A Light in August`. The paper examines the image of Christmas as an eternal outsider of mixed heritage with a conflicted self-image, which plays itself out in the novel through his relationships with others.
`The selection begins with Christmas, once again, on the run. `He went down the road fast` when Bobbie tells him she has her period. He takes this as a sort of betrayal, that her menstruating was something that made her imperfect or unclean somehow. When Joe hears one of his more experienced peers describe the`physical ceremony` with nauseating detail he views it as some kind of dirty secret women use against men:`They all want to,` the boy had said. `But sometimes they can’t.