Narrative Structure Of Light In August

Light in August,a masterpiece written by the Nobel Prize Winner,William Faulkner, is one of his main novels in his writing career. Since it has been firstly published in 1932, a great deal of comments of different viewpoints have put forward constantly.This paper is employed to show the special narrative structure of Light in August. It is not narrated in chronological order; it is full of flashbacks, tangential stories that took place in the distant past, and retellings of already-narrated scenes. The structure of the novel is full of long loops and circles; the episodic narrative fragments of the novel can be recuperated into three strands with Joe Christmas, Gail Hightower and Lena Grove at the center respectively. Christmas, whose uncertain racial identity affects every aspect of his life, makes his character to be isolated from the society. The book closes where it begins, by focusing on the travels of Lena Grove, she is the symbol of nature, twinkling with the Grandeur of Natural Humanity. Appropriately, Gale Hightower, haunted by his grandfather's past, loses touch with reality, but achieves a spiritual rebirth by traveling the moral distance from selfish immunity to redemption with the conviction that immunity cannot be bought. On the basis of the similarities and dissimilarities, one strand echoes the other. Thus, the novel achieves its thematic unity with technique of writing such as juxtaposition and reflexive reference.Meanwhile, According to James Craig LaDrierethis, this paper indicates two different forms of voice to make the character manifestation in Light in August.: the basic voice, narrated by the third people or omniscient, which is used to portray objective facts and natural phenomena; the mind voice or heightened voice, origin from deep interior heart of characters and rooted in it, which has a powerful insight and expressive ability, is uses to tell exactly what a person is thinking and to give the reader the illusion of eavesdropping on mental phenomena. Just because Faulkner utilizes multifunctional voices to depict character would this novel has typical style of its ownIn Faulkner's novel, different characters have different senses in treating time, which determine their respective life experience. With the employment of Bergson's theory of durée, this chapter analyses the influence of different time treatment from the three protagonists on their foreordinations. The reader should be proposed to use proper attitude towards the past, present and the future, so as to perfect our life and achieve a meaningful life in the time world.All in all, the juxtapositional narrative strands, the multifunctional narrative and the continuous narrative time are integral to an understanding and to appreciation of Light in August.