As a predominant character, Joe Christmas contributes greatly to the motifs and larger themes within Faulkner’s novel Light in August.  As the story unfolds, Christmas gains a reader’s sympathy, adding a heroic nature to his character.  The plot progresses, as does Christmas’ character according to the tragic curve.  Leading to his death, he suffers through a downfall typical of a tragic hero, highlighting and illuminating major and minor themes such as race.

In the broader scope of the novel, Christmas’ life, and the loss thereof, represents one of Faulkner’s goals, a message foiled through his character.  Although unexpected indeed, the progression of his life and his contributions to the novel make Joe Christmas a tragic hero.

A child born out of wedlock to a white mother and to a father of unknown ancestry, Joe Christmas finds himself first questioning himself at an early age.  The people surrounding him during the early years of his childhood treat him as though he is much different.

“I don’t see how we failed to see it as long as we did.  You can look at his face now, his eyes and hair” (Faulkner, 134). 

This passage, spoken by the Dietitian describes well the shock and collective attitude that Joe receives from everyone around him.  He is neither white nor black but rather of an assimilated race apart from both groups.

“He was sick after that.  He did not know until then that there were white women who would take a man with a black skin.  He stayed sick for two years.  Sometimes he would remember how he had once tricked or teased white men into calling him a negro in order to fight them, to beat them or be beaten; now he fought the negro who called him white” (Faulkner, 225).

This separation from both racial groups continues for the remainder of Christmas’ life, eventually leading to his demise.

Christmas’ has never experienced the compassionate sympathy that a mother or woman can offer to a man.  For Christmas, the only way of rationalizing life is through authority.  Authority has surrounded him for the entirety of his life, and only through the contemplation of his inherent punishment can he base his judgment.  On account of the manner in which he was raised, both by the Dietitian and Mr. McEachern, lashings, beatings and other such forms of direct punishment are about the only thing Christmas can comprehend.  He is unable to understand things as passion and love, for he has never experienced such feelings genuinely.

“It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men” (Faulkner, 169).

He finds himself fallen “victim” to the “soft kindness” of Mrs. McEachern.  “‘She was trying to make me cry.  Then she thinks that they would have had me’” (Faulkner, 169).  Christmas denies his trust to every person, and never ceases to be on the offensive.

Both issues that surround Christmas, race and his reluctance to compassion, are two major themes that Faulkner transports through the life of Joe Christmas.  The details of his upbringings not only explain how his life was shaped as it was, but also how it affected his life and eventually led to destruction.  As the plot progresses and Christmas’ tragic curve begins it’s decent, these flaws in his character, begin to have an increasingly larger and larger influence on the course that his life is taking.  He has committed murders and spent years on the road, traveling to and from different cities, different groups of people, trying to find his place.

After weeks of evading the law, Christmas is captured and shot to death by Percy Grimm.  Prior to his death, however, Christmas is castrated, representing the lack of fertility that his life has produced.  Race was such a sensitive issue in this post-civil war period and Christmas’ incapacity to belong to any such group doomed him to tragedy.

Such fatalistic themes create the overall message of the novel.  In this sense, Christmas’ life as a tragic hero represented much more than the misery and destruction by which it was composed.  As do all tragic heroes, Christmas lived and died for a goal higher than himself.  The uncertainty of his race and the convoluted nature of his childhood doom him to the tragic life that he led.  Associating a doomed fate with these two such factors comment immensely on the social and political situations of the early twentieth century.  These messages are bold and intentional in Light in August, and it is by way of Christmas’ tragic attributes that these themes are envisioned.