Life: Past, Present And Future

The theme of time is always considered to be one of the main concerns in Faulkner's works. However, in terms of the study on his Light in August which is full of characters' time and life struggle, it is greatly neglected and insufficiently approached. And this paper aims to probe into the time theme in the novel which mainly lies in the author's implied idea about how to properly deal with time in human life. The idea is generally embodied in the author's arrangement of those characters' various time treatments and their corresponding different life experiences.Thus in the paper, with the employment of Bergson's theory of duree, we will at first respectively elaborate on the different time treatments of the three most important and representative characters therein—Joe Christmas, Gail Hightower, and Lena Grove, together with their relevant life experiences. Among them, Christmas is the one who unconsciously doesn't let the past go and consequently quickens his step toward the doom;Hightower shifts his time treatment from conscious immersion in a specific piece of past to the conscious self-positioning in present, which changes him from being a sheer dreamer and "outsider" to a full social being;Lena keeps a balanced treatment of past, present and future, and hence lives a harmonious and promising life.With the juxtaposition of these analyses, the author's proposed proper attitude toward past, present and future in human life is revealed to be represented by Lena's case and is greatly highlighted by the contrasted case of Christmas and the transitional one of Hightower, that is, life should be basically orientated toward present, and living in present, we should constantly refer back to the past for helpful pieces of memory to tackle present situations well, while being aware of a proper future goal and adjusting our steps toward it. Such an idea not only illuminates a way out for some of us who are bogged down in the formidable force of time, especially past, but also helps all of us to achieve and maintain a proper and meaningful life.