In a loose, unstructured modernist narrative style that draws from Christian allegory and oral storytelling, Faulkner explores themes of race, sex, class, and religion in the American South.

By focusing on characters who are misfits, outcasts, or otherwise marginalized in their community, he portrays the clash of alienated individuals against a Puritanical, prejudiced rural society.

It begins with the journey of Lena Grove, a young pregnant white woman from Doane's Mill, Alabama, who is trying to find Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child.

Not hearing from Burch and harassed by her older brother for her illegitimate pregnancy, Lena walks and hitchhikes to Jefferson, Mississippi, a town in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

Having redeemed himself at last, Hightower is then depicted as falling into a deathlike swoon, his whole life flashing before his eyes, including the past adventures of his Confederate grandfather, who was killed while stealing chickens from a farmer's shed.

[2] However, critics like Diane Roberts and David R. Jarraway view Faulkner's use of Southern gothic genre tropes, such as the dilapidated plantation house and the focus on mystery and horror, as self-conscious modernist commentary on man's "warped relationship with the past"[3] and the impossibility of determining true identity.

[4] According to Daniel Joseph Singal, Faulkner's literary style gradually developed from 19th century Victorian to modernist, with Light in August more firmly grounded in the tradition of the latter.

[7] As in his other novels, Faulkner employs elements of oral storytelling, allowing different characters to lend voice to the narrative in their own distinct Southern idiom.

[9] Speaking of his choice of title, Faulkner denied this interpretation and stated, ... in August in Mississippi there's a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there's a foretaste of fall, it's cool, there's a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times.

"[1]Within the novel itself, the title is alluded to when Gail Hightower sits at his study window waiting for his recurring vision of his grandfather's last raid.

[1] All of the protagonists in the novel are misfits and social outcasts surrounded by an impersonal and largely antagonistic rural community, which is represented metonymically through minor or anonymous characters.

Both Joe Christmas and Lena Grove are orphans, strangers in town, and social outcasts, though the former draws anger and violence from the community, while the latter is looked down upon but receives generous assistance in her travels.

Chapter 6 begins with the oft-cited sentence: "Memory believes before knowing remembers," and gives an account of the five-year-old Christmas amongst the uniform denim of the other children.

Because of this, Joe Christmas is fixated on the idea that he has some African American blood, which Faulkner never confirms, and views his parentage as an original sin that has tainted his body and actions since birth.

[19] Because of this, an early critic concluded that blackness and women were the "'twin Furies of the Faulknerian deep Southern Waste Land'" and reflected Faulkner's animosity toward life.

[20] However, while women and minorities are both viewed as "subversive" and are restricted by the patriarchal society depicted in the novel, Lena Grove is able to travel safely and be cared for by people who hate and mistrust her, because she plays on the conventional rule that men are responsible for a woman's wellbeing.

[22] In Light in August, as in most of the other novels set in Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner focuses mainly on poor white Southerners, both from the upper and lower classes, who struggle to survive in the ruined post-war economy of the South.

The characters in Light in August—who are mostly from the lower classes, with the exception of Reverend Hightower and Joanna Burden—are united by poverty and Puritanical values that cause them to regard an unwed mother like Lena Grove with disdain.

[25] According to Michael Millgate, though it is not typically considered Faulkner's best novel, Light in August was recognized early on as being "a major text, central to any understanding or evaluation of his career as a whole.

"[24] He argues that many of the early American critics, most of whom were urban Northerners who viewed the South as backward and reactionary, focused on Faulkner's technical innovation in the field of narrative but missed or ignored the regional details and interconnectedness of the characters and setting to other works by the author.

In spite of these complaints, the novel came to be viewed positively because of its violence and dark themes, as this was a contrast to the sentimental, romantic Southern literature of the time.