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William Faulkner: Death
built 615 days ago
William Faulkner spent some time in bed, badly injured and in great pain. He had still not fully recovered from the fall when he died. He was in the hospital, where he had been admitted for a check-up on his progress. But legend refuses to accept that the fall from his horse was the cause of his death. He was killed by a thrombosis on July 6, 1962, when he was not quite sixty-five.
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NOTE: NELSE PATTON When Faulkner was eleven years old, Nelse Patton, a black man in Oxford, was accused of decapitating a white woman. Some people think that this murder was the source for Christmas's decapitation of Joanna Burden. But unlike Christmas, Patton died at the hands of the community. A mob urged on by a local politician took him from the jail. The jailers did little to stop the crowd, which shot Patton to death, then mutilated him horribly.
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After carefully building such descriptive statements, Faulkner flashes back in time and examines the events that lead up to the moment of death. This toggling of events has been skillfully constructed, building suspense in a way that a straight forward chronology could not. The first unusual element that catches the curiosity of the reader is the mention of “the smell,” which happened “thirty years before” (667).
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Specific residences are almost always Faulkner's fictional creations. The Jefferson of Light in August has four main centers: the town, the planing mill, the Burden estate, and Hightower's home. These latter two settings on Jefferson's physical outskirts reflect their occupants' psychological distance from the larger human community. And Joe's residence in a slave cabin on the Burden estate suggests the lack of equality in his relationship with Joanna, while Lena's stay in that same cabin suggests a symbolic connection between Joe's death and the birth of her child.
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