Prayer in William Faulkners Light in August Essays

I decline to accept the end of man...I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. -William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1949 William Faulkner illustrates many dimensions of prayer in Light in August: his characters avoid it, abuse it, embrace it, and blame it. In every case, Faulkner portrays prayers power on the psyche. His fictional world seems Godless, yet his characters struggle to prevail through prayer. Joanna Burden, Gail Hightower, and Joe Christmas exemplify three different approaches to prayer.†¦show more content†¦A short time later, Faulkner notes that Joanna is resisting this urge: Im not ready to pray yet, she admits aloud, Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while (264). This, her first prayer, remains her most honest; in fact, it is one of the most poignant prayers of the novel. She confesses to a human impulse that few articulate: the desire to sin now and be saved later. She wants to believe in Christmas concept of a life of healthy and normal sin but deep down, she knows sin is detrimental (Faulkner 260). In asking her Creator for a little more damnation, she stumbles upon her latent longing to create. But this burst of fervor fades when she is forced to confront reality: her pregnancy and her unstable relationship with Christmas. She cannot afford to prolong her damnation, so Joanna reverts to her old self, lecturing her lover on his need to attend law school and urging him to repent (Brooks 90). Her old self is tainted by her fathers racist doctrine and it poisons her attempts to serve blacks (Brooks 88). That poisoned childhood surfaces when she kneels to pray the second time, speaking only in the symbolwords she has been taught (Faulkner, 280). Faulkners compound word indicates that Joannas prayer stands for something else but is empty at the core. The words do not come from her heart, but from her mind, recalling what she has been taught. Twice, Faulkner uses the words abjectness and prideShow MoreRelated William Faulkners Use of Shakespeare Essay5388 Words   |  22 PagesWilliam Faulkners Use of Shakespe are Throughout his career William Faulkner acknowledged the influence of many writers upon his work--Twain, Dreiser, Anderson, Keats, Dickens, Conrad, Balzac, Bergson, and Cervantes, to name only a few--but the one writer that he consistently mentioned as a constant and continuing influence was William Shakespeare. Though Faulkner’s claim as a fledgling writer in 1921 that â€Å"[he] could write a play like Hamlet if [he] wanted to† (FAB 330) may be dismissed as