What happens in Chapter 20 of Light in August?
Chapter 20 returns to Gail Hightower, the disgraced former minister who has spent decades in self-imposed exile in Jefferson, burdened by the memory of the Confederate cavalry charge that claimed his grandfather's life. Following the violent aftermath of Joe Christmas's death—after Hightower's futile attempt to provide an alibi for Christmas and witnessing Percy Grimm's brutal castration and murder—he finds himself alone at his window in the fading August light, a spot he has occupied for thirty years. His thoughts drift through a long, involuntary reflection: he revisits his failed marriage, his damaging obsession with his grandfather's legacy, and his guilty indifference toward the suffering of those around him—Lena Grove, Joe Christmas, Byron Bunch. The reflection builds to a hallucinatory vision where the faces of everyone connected to his life flash before him like a cavalry charge, and for one harrowing, clarifying moment, his grandfather's face merges with Joe Christmas's. The chapter concludes with Hightower hearing, or perhaps imagining he hears, the thunder of hooves—the same phantom charge that has shaped and shattered his life—finally fading into silence.
Analysis
Faulkner crafts this chapter as a lengthy interior monologue that serves both as a confession and an elegy. The wheel image—Hightower observing faces "wheel" past him—acts as the chapter's central device, transforming linear time into a cycle and tying Hightower to the novel's larger exploration of how the past invades the present. The merging of Christmas's face with the grandfather's represents Faulkner's boldest artistic choice: it compels Hightower, and the reader, to see that his romantic obsession with Confederate glory is not just nostalgic but also dangerously destructive, a form of violence inflicted on the living by the dead.
The tone of the chapter is mournful yet unflinching. Faulkner denies catharsis: Hightower's self-awareness comes too late to offer redemption, and the writing captures this delay through long, complex sentences filled with subordinate clauses that postpone their conclusions. The August light, which appears throughout the novel as a sign of suspended, overripe time, takes on a distinctly funereal quality here—the chapter's title motif finally clarifying its dual meaning between illumination and heat-death.
The ghostly cavalry charge, heard rather than seen, indicates that Hightower's insight hasn't broken the cycle; the sound of hoofbeats fades but doesn't cease. Faulkner employs free indirect discourse to blur the line between Hightower's rationalization and true recognition, leaving the reader unsure whether this represents a moral awakening or yet another act of suffering—a distinction that the novel intentionally leaves unresolved.
Key quotes from Chapter 20
“The wheel of thinking turns on, in those cooling flesh and bone and blood, and the faces wheel past: contemptuous, scaling, without pity or mercy.”
Hightower sits at his window after Christmas's death, his mind cycling involuntarily through every face his failures have touched.
“Then it seems to him that some ultimate damned flood within him breaks and rushes away. He seems to watch it, feeling himself losing contact with earth, lighter than air, emptying, emptying.”
The moment Hightower's long self-deception begins to crack, rendered in Faulkner's characteristic syntax of dissolution.
“The dying thunder of hooves, dying away, as though it were galloping past the house and on, dying, dying, dying away.”
The chapter's closing image—the phantom cavalry charge that has defined Hightower's existence receding, ambiguously, into silence.