Light In August
Chapters 10-12
Journal response/ Open book
Chapters 10-12 deal with the relationship between Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden. Discuss what you believe are the most important aspect(s) in their relationship that ends in such tragedy. Below are some questions that you should consider in your response. In a two-page + written response, determine the most significant cause(s) of the eventual break-down. You do not have to answer every question, nor even follow the order that I have here, but you need to be thorough and thoughtful. I don’t need a plot summary, but more of a cause/effect analysis. You need to use ink and quotations.
Consider the following questions:
1. What is the nature of Joe Christmas's relationship with Joanna Burden? Is her New England background important? How does that background influence her feelings about race and religion? How does this fit with her sexual behavior?
2. Draw Joanna Burden’s family tree. What conclusions can be drawn about her family? Why does Faulkner include it? What does it show about Joanna’s character?
3. Carefully detail the three stages in Joanna and Joe Christmas’s relationship—the getting-to-know-you phase, the nymphomania and depravity of the second phase, Joanna’s desire for a family in the third. Explain the conflicts involved in each.
4. Does each of the characters carry too much baggage from the past? Is the relationship doomed from the start?
5. In what way could Joanna Burden be held responsible for her own death? How much of a victim is she?
6. Before the night of Joanna Burden’s death, Joe Christmas thinks, “Something is going to happen to me.” Faulkner seems to be interested in the relationship between volition and passivity in the novel; how do you understand the “paradox” of will and fate as it embraced by Joe Christmas? Is Joanna Burden similarly caught between will and fate? Look at Joanna Burden’s discussion of her father’s French blood as an explanation of the way he responds to the deaths in his family.
7. This is all you know of Joanna Burden’s death. Read this part carefully again, and try to construe step by step how she died. What can be assumed? What is given to us as fact? Why is so much left out?
8. Why does the relationship end in a death rather than a birth other than the literal reasons? What is symbolized, in other words, by the fact that relationship ends in Joanna’s death and Joe Christmas’s flight?
9. What is the purpose of the young couple at the end of the chapter?