Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
The Dead Sheep
In a novel steeped in religious imagery—including hints
of crucifixion and the wooden cross on which it occurred—Joe Christmas’s killing
of the sheep is a brief but telling addition to this set of Christian
symbols. Like many adolescents, Christmas finds the onset of his
sexual urges and increasing curiosity and knowledge unsettling. When
he is first acquainted with the workings of a woman’s menstrual
cycle, he is sickened and repulsed by the knowledge. The only catharsis
he can find is in the bloody sacrifice of a farmer’s sheep grazing
in a field. The irrational and impulsive act—and almost ritualistic
spilling of blood—foreshadows the two additional killings that come
to haunt Joe and ultimately seal his fate. In addition, the sheep
is indirectly established as a double for Christmas, the sacrificial
lamb who heads willingly to the slaughter in the ways that he actively
seeks his own death and destruction. The sheep’s brutal killing
also anticipates the shooting and castration that awaits Joe in Reverend
Hightower’s kitchen.
Smoke Rising from the Burden House
The fateful day on which Lena arrives in Jefferson is
marked also by the killing of Miss Burden and the burning of her
home. Up until that point, Byron Bunch had docilely pursued his
ritualized and deliberately uncomplicated existence. Meeting Lena
at the mill, though, as he later recounts to Hightower, he is so
distracted and unsettled by her presence that he never consciously
sees the plume of smoke rising on the horizon “in plain sight like
it was put there to warn me.” Later, the omniscient narrator states
that, when Byron realizes Lucas Burch and Joe Brown are one and
the same, “[i]t seemed to him that fate, circumstance, had set a
warning in the sky all day long in that pillar of yellow smoke,
and he too stupid to read it.”
But Byron’s impression of the smoke as an ill omen of
ill will is another example of misinterpretation in the novel. The
smoke serves not as a harbinger of bad times to come but marks,
rather, the ending or the passing away of an existing order. The
fire at the Burden house serves as a ritualistic cleansing, releasing
the tragedy and violence that has marked Jefferson that August and
paving the way for Lena’s life-bearing presence and the new sense
of commitment and obligation it triggers in Byron.
The Street
In its overt identification as a symbolic entity, the
generalized notion of the street emerges as a powerful metaphor
of the ongoing search for self-acceptance and belonging that Lena
and Joe Christmas undertake in the novel. The image first appears
after Christmas kills his stepfather and is then abandoned by Bobbie
Allen and her cohorts. Stepping off the porch of the abandoned house,
Joe “entered the street which was to run for fifteen years.” In
the fruitless wanderings that ensue, the street typifies Joe’s restless,
self-defeating search for personal meaning. The street also takes
on dimensions of a tempting release and escape from his self-imprisoning
consciousness. But it is a mirage and a lure that delivers neither the
resolution nor the answers that Christmas seeks. Lena’s “street”—her
personal journey—leads to new hope and possibility, whereas Joe’s
draws him headlong into additional suffering, bitterness, and eventually
death.
