Light in August, Ch. 7-8

1. volition (page 177): the power of choosing or determining, will.

2. The story is now three years after McEachern adopted Joe, and he is very angry with Joe because he has not memorized his catechism. He whips Joe many times before he eventually passes out. Joe wakes up with Mr. McEachern at his bedside who forces him to kneel, and pray for forgiveness before he leaves for a church service. During this service Mrs. McEachern brings Christmas a plate of food, but he threw it on the ground. Only several hours later does he decide to eat it off of the ground. A few years later, Joe and a few other boys convince a woman to go to the shed to have sex with them, but instead of having sex with her, Joe beats her. Joe then realizes that he is going to be punished for not getting his daily chores done. A couple of years after that, Joe sells his calf and buys a suit with the money. Mr. McEachern finds the suit hidden, and Joe lies about what happened to his calf. Mr. McEachern punches Joe in the face and Mrs. McEachern in an attempt to help Joe says that she bought him the suit with her butter money. Mr. McEachern knows she is lying and forces her to ask for forgiveness. Joe then sneaks out of his house and waits for a woman to come pick him up, he then remembers the first time he met her when Mr. McEachern brought him to town. He takes Joe to a shady restaurant in an alley, and then after eating he tells him that he is never to go there again. However, on the next trip he goes there and orders food. He discovers he does not have enough money to pay for his food and the waitress pays for him. He learns that the woman's name is Bobbie and they continue to see each other until he learns that she is a prostitute. Meanwhile, he has been stealing money from Mrs. McEachern and she has figured it out.

3. Faulkner is providing memories from Joe Christmas' past to explain why he does some of the things that he does. Joe's memory haunts him because it is full of shame, abuse and anger. He was not used to any act of kindness being done for him, which is why when Mrs. McEachern brings him food, he tosses it to the ground. He loathed Mrs. McEachern, even though she was only trying to help. On page 168 it says, " It was the woman who, with a woman's affinity and instinct for secrecy, for casting a faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions... It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men." Joe Christmas cannot break free from his memories and ideas that everybody, especially women, were out to hurt him. This leads to his anger which cannot be tamed, that could possibly get him into trouble in the future.

4. a) If Mr. McEachern is such a religious man, then why does he resort to violence whenever Joe commits an even minor wrongdoing?

b) If the money from the calf was Joe's then why did Mr. McEachern punch him for spending it how he pleased?

c) Joe believes that Mrs. McEachern is doing every act of kindness out of pure evil, and that it is with the intent to make him cry. Does Faulkner believe that women are not as innocent as we think, and they have other motives for doing what they do?