Byron Bunch's normal life takes on an abnormal burden when he meets Lena Grove. Upon meeting Lena, Byron, a man who "has spent six days of every week for seven years at the planing mill, feeding boards into the machinery," begins spending a large amount of time taking care of her (47). As Peter Swiggart has noted, Lena's introduction to Byron forces him out of his unemotional "sanctuary" and into "ordinary responsibilities" (143). By leaving his monastery of the planing mill, Byron must take on emotional and physical burdens for which he had never prepared himself, the burdens which trigger Hightower's above thoughts about man's incessant endurance. Following some dream of love, Byron sees to it that Lena is protected in Mrs. Beard's boarding house. Later he quits both his church choir job and his job at the planing mill, and he moves Lena out to Joe Christmas' old cabin, where he sleeps in a tent while Lena waits for her husband to return from the county jail. At the end of the book, Byron and Lena depart from Jefferson to search for Lena's estranged husband. Byron is still carrying immense burdens, not only the physical one of taking care of Lena, but also a burden of shame and heartache: Byron knows that Lena still does not want to marry him. The furniture repairer at the end of the book mentions one incident where Byron tries to sleep in the same bed as Lena. Lena quickly reprimands Byron, addressing him as "Mr. Bunch," and makes him leave like a six-year-old child. The repairer then says to his wife, "Well, I was downright ashamed to look at him, to let him know that any human man had seen and heard what happened. I be dog if I didn't want to find the hole and crawl into it with him. I did for a fact. And him standing there where she had set him down" (503-4). But Byron carries this shame and bears it. He could leave and find a younger woman who would love him from the start, as Hightower had once suggested, but instead he stays with Lena. Even when Byron leaves for half a day after that night with the furniture repairer, he still comes back, because he knows that even this shame he can bear. It is terrible that Byron can bear anything, because he can indefinitely endure the shame and heartache Lena creates for him.

In the case of Gail Hightower, several literary critics have established him as a prototype of endurance, of man's ability to bear anything. In an essay examining Faulkner's famous words in his Nobel Prize Acceptance speech, Alexander Welsh examines Light in August as a "modernist reaction" to both passive, enduring heroes and aggressive, prevailing heroes (144). Welsh writes, "[Faulkner's] Hightower, in Light in August, is a grotesque version of the passive hero, who has failed his marriage, given away his paltry estate, and become simply and rather meanly the observer" (131). Hightower's greatest burdens come from the "unspeakably painful" recognitions of the past brought forth "by the truth of memory" (Berland, 51).

The immense burdens of Hightower's past commence with the phantoms of his grandfather. Hightower is tormented because he believes that he cannot live, since the last instants of his life were stolen from him one afternoon in Jefferson when his grandfather died. The two contrasting images of Hightower's grandfather also torment him. On the one glorious side, Hightower must idolize him as a brave, chivalrous soldier who died courageously in battle. Yet Hightower must also bear the burden of truth; he knows that his grandfather was killed stealing chickens. Also in Hightower's past is the guilt and sadness he must bear for his wife. Even when his wife was alive, Hightower bore a peculiar disappointment with marriage. Faulkner writes, "And again [Hightower] thought quietly, without much surprise and perhaps without hurt: I see. That's the way it is. Marriage. Yes. I see now" (482). Hightower is tormented by the realization that because he rejected his wife's love, "his wife's suicide was in fact his own murder of her", while at the same time, he has summarily also murdered his religion (Berland, 51). The final thing that haunts Hightower is the town of Jefferson itself. Ever since Hightower was evicted from the church, he has borne the burden of an entire town despising and shunning him. Hightower bears the photographer taking his picture, and he bears the town's trying to force him to leave. Always enduring the pain, he remains in town even after the K.K.K. takes him out into the woods, ties him to a tree, and beats him until he is unconscious. And every night, Hightower hears the service at the church where he used to preach, knowing when it will come, and yet not knowing the actual time in hours and minutes, and not actually hearing it so much anymore. Hightower must bear the truth of the past, that tells him that he is now an old man, that tells him that he has failed, that tells him that his grandfather too was a failure. He must endure all of this pain, "allowing himself to be persecuted, to be dragged from his bed at night and carried into the woods and beaten with sticks, he all the while bearing in the townÕs sight and hearing, without shame, with that patient and voluptuous ego of the martyr, the air, the behavior, the How long, O Lord" (Faulkner, 428-429). It is terrible that Hightower allows himself to bear such pain, that he allows himself to be beaten by the K.K.K., or that he can endure the pain each day of knowing what he has lost.

Of all the characters, Joe Christmas carries the most unendurable internal and external burdens. At the heart of Joe's internal burdens are a lack of self-identity and an intense hatred of woman. Joe's lack of identity stems from the fact that he cannot live as a black or white man. Swiggart best explains this when he says that Joe's puritan hatred of negroes conflicts with his own Negro blood and his desires for food and lust (139). Joe fails at living as a white man, because he can deny neither his possible black heritage nor his own desires for food and lust, being "tortured by an inner fear of corruption," the fear of being Negro (Hall, 71). Joe's attempt at living as a black man also fails: Joe's puritan morality, so deeply impressed into him by McEachern and Doc Hines, despises everything Negro, even his own blood and the black family he lived with. Joe's second internal burden is a deeply entrenched hatred of women, originating in the early dark catacombs of his memories. Beliefs that women are evil, foolish, and tricksters, stemming from the dietitian, Mrs. McEachern, and Bobbie, lead Joe to irrational abuse, fear, and hate of any woman he encounters. Because of his hatred of women and the life they provide, Joe sets himself on a tortuous road of suffering and burdens, all the while despising not only women themselves, but also food and his own life, since these are manifest only through the abomination of women.

After years on an endless road of suffering and burdens, Joe finally reaches the greatest of all external burdens in his life: Joanna Burden. Even Joanna Burden's very name is indicative of the burden she is to Joe: several critics mention the symbolism of her surname, and William Faulkner is quoted in Faulkner in the University as saying that his choice of the name Burden followed the old morality play tradition of assigning names characterized by "what they looked like or what they did" (Swiggart, 138; qtd. in Hall 48). Joe bears both the shame of which Joanna reminds him when she prays for him, and the suffering that she pulls Joe into because of her fits of madness and false hopes. Due to Joanna's restless insanity, Joe finds himself being pushed down into a hopeless, bottomless pit (Hall, 49). Nonetheless, Joe bears this Burden, and it is terrible that for all the suffering she inflicts upon him, from her initial secret messages to her animal rampages and her frivolous dreams of making Joe into a lawyer, Joe never has to leave. Joe is allowed to endure all this pain, and there is nothing to force him from not enduring it.

Indeed the greatest and most terrible endurance of Light in August occurs when Joe is caught by Percy Grimm. Of sound mind and body, and armed, but not fighting, not even responding, Joe allows Percy Grimm to shoot him, and then castrate him. More terrible than anything else is the fact that Joe never does fight back. He only endures. To watch a man bear incredible pain and loss throughout his life, never managing to escape it, and never managing to be freed from it is the terrible thing about a man being able to bear anything.

Each of these characters is a sort of Atlas, an unfortunate Titan who has been charged with keeping his part of the heavens from crashing down to earth. Faulkner shows us that these men can bear more than the world itself. He shows that Byron can endure leaving everything he has ever known to live in the shame of following a woman to whom he is not even married, in the hope that someday she will live with him. Hightower carries the phantoms of the past and the pain of failure as he sits in his study, watching dusk, thinking now soon. Joe bears the loss of himself, the tortuous road of his life, and the most painful moments leading up to his death, quietly, seemingly removed from the world itself, but never from the suffering. And yet for all this pain, these men never break down, there is never a need to escape, because they can bear anything. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner said, "I believe that man will not only endure: he will prevail," and that the duty of the poet was to aid man in his ability to endure, to give man hope and strength. With the pain that Faulkner creates in the stories of these characters, Faulkner adroitly depicts the terrible nature of man being able to bear anything, and perhaps also, the humane importance of the poet helping make man's burdens a little less terrible than they may seem to be.

Berland, Alwyn. Light in August: A Study in Black and White. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1932.

Hall, Joan Wylie. "Burdens, Bunyan, and Light in August." American Notes and Queries 24.3-4 (1985):48-50.

Hoffman, Frederick J. William Faulker. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1960.

Swiggart, Peter. The Art of Faulkner's Novels. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962.

Welsh, Alexander. "On the Difference Between Prevailing and Enduring." New Essays on Light in August. Ed. Michael Milgate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 123-147.

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