Themes

Gail Hightower recognizes the forces that control the lives of so many characters in Light in August. After he has been forced back into life by delivering Lena's baby and attempting to save Joe Christmas, Hightower meditates by his window, listening to music from a church in which he used to preside: Listening, he seems to hear with it the apotheosis of his own history, his own land, his own environed blood: that people from which he sprang and among whom he lives who can never take either pleasure or catastrophe or escape from either, without brawling over it. Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear; their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable. And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another?

The idea of people being...