Light in August is not Faulkners most difficult novel to read,but it is generally considered to be his most difficult one to understand.Here he combined numerous themes on a large canvas where many aspects of life are vividly portrayed and with newer insights into human nature.The novel may be interpreted on many levels.It suggests such themes as mans isolation in the modern world,mans responsibility to the community,mans inhumanity to man,and the theme of denial and flight as opposed to passive acceptance and resignation.In Light in August Faulkner seems to have been much more concerned with individuals in their relationship to society at large,and it is quite significant that in this novel all the major characters are at once aliens to the community of Jefferson and solitary figures without normal family ties.Yet their alienation rom the community does not mean that they estranged totally from its values.Indeed,all of them--with the possible exception of Lena Grove,who seems to exist in a space of her owm--have absorbed and internalized these values so well that their conflict with society is always a war on two fronts,a war both without and within.Although the entire novel strives prodigiously,in detail after detail,to connect its characters by merging their responsibilities and actions,and by embedding their lives within one another in almost ridiculous ways,the effect of such exertions in quite simply to render the endless analogous details superfluous and the embedded lives fruitless.No sooner are the stories of two or more characters brought together than they are torn away from one another,creating in the novel an energy of fusion and division in which opposites appear to be created neither by emotional merger nor by extreme alienation but rather by holding both in generative,ironic proximity.The book is focused on a series of confrontations:Joanna-Christmas,Lena-Bunch,and then another series:Bunch-Hightower,Christmas-Hightower,Grimm-Christmas.These meetings,mostly between strangers and some meetings of mere suggestions of possibility,form the spinal column of the book.Faulkner means to dramatize both the terrors of isolation and erosion of relationships,it is appropriate that several characters,each breadking out of his own obscurity,should collide,cause pain and then part.It is in moments of confrontation that one is most troubled by a sense of self-estrangement,as in moments of loneliness that one learns to reckon the exhaustion that comes from human relationships.Each character sets off concentric waves,some of them out of his past,some from his present,and these waves meet the waves set off by others,resulting themselves in more complex waves.Small and harmless actions,moving through different individuals and their differing systems of values,become larger and largeer,out of proportion and unrecognizable from their origins in force and result.The hermit,the eccentric,the outlaw--each moves and is moved in a private dance called by elaborate combination with the private dances of others.If we take comedy as the individuals absorption into the community and tragedy as the individuals expulsion from the community,then,Joe and Joannas tragic alternative community stands opposed to Lena and Byrons comic community.Certainly there are clear comic markers at the end of Light in August:rebirth,represented by Lenas infant,and marriage,at leastimplied in Byron and Lenas future.The structure of the novel is best seen in terms of a wheel or of a circular image.Joes actions form the central part of the novel and are see as the hub of the actions,but Lenas actions are used to introduce the novel and close the novel.In between these two stands the figure of the Reverend Gail Hightower.Therefore,in terms of the total structure of the novel,Hightower is the spokes of the wheel connecting the actions of Lena and Joe,who never actually meet each other.Lean remains as the person transcending all experiences,and Joe is the character whose life is examined in depth in the center of the novel.The final structure then may be summarized as follows:first,Lena(the rim of frame for the action);second,Hightower(the spokes of the wheel) and then Joe Christmas(the hub of the wheel).And the novel closes in exactly the same order--after we have completed the actions connected with Joe Christmas the novel focuses again on Hightower and then closes with Lena.Thus briefly,the novel runs:Lena-Hightower-JOE CHRISTMAS-Hightower-Lena.