Abstract
William Faulkner's Light in August, published in 1932, might be regarded as his most inscrutable work. Such inscrutability, or difficulty in comprehension, is mostly caused by the variety of problems dealt with and by the intricacies of the past and the present or of the plural stories about the plural main characters in the book. This work is, as we might say, so chaotic and so multi-layered that it shows too many things and dazes the readers. Thus, in order to comprehend as far as possible, this paper deals with Gail Hightower only.
Needless to say, Hightower is completely absorbed in his ancestral past. Although there are plenty of critics statements about his absorption in the past, the cause and the process for it seem to be still veiled. The purpose of this study is to examine Hightower's childhood and reveal that cause and process with the help of the psychoanalytic works of Jacques Lacan. Finally, revealing them, we can find the last attitude of Hightower in chapter 20 means the beginning of his new life.
