Summary: Chapter 20
Reverend Hightower muses on his past and the lives of
his father and grandfather. His grandfather was a slave-owning lawyer
who understood neither his son’s abolitionist stance nor his desire,
from his teen years, to preach to rural congregations. When Hightower’s father
was married, his grandfather ceded the house and property to his
son. Hightower’s father went off to fight in the Civil War, but
he did not empathize with the South’s cause and never fired a gun
during the entire four years of his service. Instead, he learned
to be a medic and became a doctor at the end of the conflict. Hightower’s grandfather
was killed during a raid on Jefferson during the war; Hightower
remembers, as a boy, looking at his grandfather’s gray Confederate
uniform with its mysterious blue patch.
Hightower was raised in the presence of these phantoms
of the past—his father, mother, grandfather, and the slave woman
his grandfather had owned until the war. Hightower entered the seminary
and later married, intent on being given a church in Jefferson. Eventually,
this goal did come to pass. Hightower then muses on his wife’s indiscretions
and his own fall from grace, wondering whether he used his wife
as means of gaining a foothold in the town of Jefferson. As his
thoughts race ahead, Hightower sees the faces of those who constitute
his world and sees the “other” face of Christmas, the goodness in
it, that had lain hidden from the world for so long. Hightower feels
he is dying as he imagines he hears the thundering cavalry charge
of his grandfather’s company sweeping by.
Summary: Chapter 21
A furniture dealer tells his wife of an incident that
occurred during a recent trip to Mississippi. He recalls how he
met Byron, Lena, and the baby, who are in search of a ride to no
specific destination—just farther down the road. When they stop
for the night, the couple asks to sleep in the bed of the truck.
Around the campfire, the man learns that the baby is not Byron’s
and that the couple is searching for another, unnamed man. When
it comes time to go to sleep, Lena climbs into the truck. When Byron
tries to climb in beside her, she spurns his advances and sends
him off by the fire. Instead, Byron disappears and does not return
the next morning. Calmly, Lena packs up and continues along with
the driver. Eventually, Byron appears beside the road, and the truck
slows to pick him up. Riding side by side, two wanderers, not necessarily
searching for anyone or anything, travel deeper and deeper into
Tennessee. Lena muses that she has been farther in the past two
months than in her entire life up to that point.
Analysis
In a symbolic gesture of acceptance and return, Hightower
assists Lena when she goes into labor. By this simple act, he is
finally able to reach out beyond his parochial, self-contained world
and “minister” to a member of the community in need. Despite the
beatings and the scorn visited on him, despite the struggle for
self-acceptance, he finally reclaims the dignity and pride that
eluded him and is finally able to make peace with his troubled past.
Through Hightower’s subsequent musings on and recollections of his
family history, Faulkner widens the scope of his inquiry to take
in the powerful historical forces that have gripped and shaped the
South. In a novel whose main characters are haunted and dogged by
their personal pasts, the pressure and influence of a commonly shared
historical past is often overlooked. Faulkner thus gives the inherent schism
that divides Hightower—and the other characters—yet another dimension
and source.
Just as there is no one definable cause of Joe Christmas’s
troubled existence, nor is there one for Hightower’s troubles; instead,
a complex combination of influences emerges. The South’s historical
past, fraught with division and bloodshed, is only one of many spheres shaping
the unstable present with which the characters are saddled. Hightower’s
inherently divided self can be traced in part to his forebears—in
particular his father, who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil
War despite being strongly opposed to Southern principles and never
firing his gun in battle. Hightower views this basic dichotomy as
“proof enough that [his father] was two separate and complete people,
one of whom dwelled by serene rules in a world where reality did
not exist.” Hightower thus finds familial and historical sources
to explain—at least in part—his own duality, disunity, and emotional
unrest. He is emblematic of the individual who is framed and contextualized
by society while at the same time outside its influence—the individual
who consciously and unconsciously absorbs and deflects the historical
and social forces surrounding him.
The novel’s final chapter marks another departure. With
Miss Burden and Christmas dead, and Reverend Hightower sliding slowly
into the grip of his own death, Jefferson is vacated. The focus shifts
again to the wanderings of Lena. As is fitting for the novel’s cyclical
nature—its inherent structure of repetition and variation—she is
once again on the road, only this time joined by her newborn and
Byron. Perhaps the most notable aspect of the novel’s conclusion,
though, is that it is narrated by a new presence, a nameless furniture
dealer who has picked up the ragtag hitchhiking family in its quest
to get to Tennessee. This gesture—this addition of yet another character
essentially tangential to the narrative—is Faulkner’s final commentary
on the chorus of voices that have collectively formulated the backdrop
of his characters’ lives and personal struggles. What remains in
the end are those who turn from experience and those who actively
seek it. Rather than resist a rootless, itinerant, and still-to-be-defined
life, Lena welcomes her wandering, her ongoing search for her place
in the world despite the suffering and challenges she may meet along
the way. Rather than fight this fate, as Joe Christmas did, she
embraces it, heading into the unknown future with a new life and
a new love in tow.
