Joe Christmas’s Identity Dilemma in William Faulkner's Light in August

The war had a critical impact throughout the history of the USA on the conquered South, which was undergoing "collective decline" leading to a "collective cultural trauma". The concept of trauma is inseparably associated with the South's ideologies, specifically the ideology of white superiority in the South. The present study investigates the role of traumatic life events on identity in Light in August. Joe Christmas, the protagonist in William Faulkner's novel, is portrayed as a trauma survivor on a never-ending quest for identification. Also, this study is an attempt to examine how the identity of Joe Christmas is formed by the collective identity of his community. Joe Christmas who is always in search of identity wishes to be a tragic character. He combats all the threats to physical, intellectual and emotional safety through violent reactions that generally occur in explosions against women because he intimately threatens his understanding of his sexuality. Joe Christmas, associating himself with the black race at many points within the novel, suffers from the mockery that entails only because he knows a bit about his personal story and enables his racial confusion to influence his sexual identity in his teenage years and adulthood. This study analyses how Christmas challenges, heightens and exacerbates Jefferson’s racial and sex-based stringent classifications. In this paper, Faulkner is undoubtedly disengaged from portraying the terrible representation of the injury by which his mulatto character experiences "Trauma Process ". In this respect, it is revealed that collective injuries are related to the collective character of America. It successively reflects the entire destructive vision of the South that is represented in Faulkner's novel.

Keywords:

Individual Identity , Racism , Outcast , Marginalized , Prejudice , Trauma