[on chs 1-7]

1. Many critics have noticed the jumble of subplots that open the novel.  What are some of the novel’s plots?  Which seems like the “main” plot, and which are subplots?  What kinds of genres seem active in these plots (e.g., comedy, tragedy, Bildungsroman, gothic, etc.)?
2. How is movement represented in the first chapter of the novel? Why might Faulkner give such emphasis to movements that seem like they are glazed on the surface of an “urn” (7)?
3. Who is Byron Bunch?  What might his name signify?  What kind of observer/analyst is he?
4. Names prove very problematic in this novel, as if they are, in Addie’s words in AILD, a “shape to fill a lack.”  What are some of the moments in which names are thematized in the novel?  What might Faulkner be getting at by featuring such slipperiness between names and selves?
5. Christmas’s entry into the novel is shrouded in mystery.  What are some of the descriptions and metaphors that attach to Christmas?  What is it about him that proves so sticky to so many different modifiers?
6. Who is Hightower? What is his relationship to time (a little puckishly, we might ask “when is Hightower?”)? How does he relate to the rest of Jefferson?
7. Close read the passage on 47 concerning the “outlandish” figure of Burden and the role played by the “phantoms” of her ancestor and those of other Jeffersonians.  What is Faulkner saying about the modern South in this moment?  Who are some other “outlandish” figures in the novel who have unfinished business with ghosts? Note, too, the connection between Burden and the Burdens of “Skirmish at Sartoris” in U.
8. At several points in chs 3-4, we get accounts of events narrated from the perspective of “the town.”  What kind of narrator, so to speak, is Jefferson?  How does the town “read” characters, motives, and events?  How does its mode of interpreting and telling stories compare to that of Hightower and Bunch?
9. How is Hightower’s body represented in the novel?  What are some of the implications of his bulk and the relationship between Hightower’s insides, so to speak, and his outside appearance?
10. Note that ch. 5 ushers in a new plot–that of the leadup to the fire at the Burden place–and a new perspective–that of Christmas.  How does the narrative change as we see things from Christmas’s vantage point?  How does this “domestic” portrait of Christmas compare to his depiction from the millworkers’ perspective?
11. How does Christmas relate to the Negro quarter of Jefferson?  What kinds of values and feelings does he associate with blackness?  With the “white” zones that abut the Negro quarter?
12. How do you read the episode in which a naked Christmas is illuminated by car headlights on p. 108?  What do you make of the metaphor linking this moment with a developing “Kodak” print?
13. Chapter 6 begins with the enigmatic statement, ““Memory believes before knowing remembers.”  What is meant by the oppositions memory/knowing and believing/remembering in this statement?  How does the plot flesh out this rather abstract statement?
14. Close read the scene in which JC eats/spits up the toothpaste.  What associations are conjured up by each of the objects and actions in this scene?  How does this scene set the stage for the rest of JCs backstory?
15. JC claims, “On this day, I became a man” on 146.  What is entailed in becoming a man for JC?  What are some of the pitfalls that he encounters on the road to manhood?  Apart from the beating that McEachern administers that constitutes the immediate context for this statement, what other rites of passage occur in this section of the text?

[on chs. 8-20]

1. What is Billie’s role in JCs development?  What does JC grow to “accept” (to use a keyword from the novel) in his dealings with her?
2. In chapter 9, Christmas kills his (foster) father, thus rendering literal the resolution to the “Oedipal drama” of Freudian theory, which hinges on the metaphorical vanquishing of the father’s image by the child.  What are some signs that this resolution will liberate Christmas and allow for his growth into adulthood?  What are some hints that this “being free at last of honor and law” (207) will prove problematic?
3. In the aftermath of this event, Christmas is often depicted as “running.”  What are some of the valences of his running?  Where is he headed, literally and figuratively?  What does his running say about the new self that he’s ostensibly created by virtue of his achieved manhood?  How is the “road” that he begins to run on (see passage on 223-4) different from the spaces that he’s moved through to this point in his life?
4. What kind of woman is Joanna Burden?  What differentiates her from other women in the novel and in Faulkner’s novels we’ve read so far? You might want to think especially about the passage at the bottom of 233 in this context, as well as the question of Joanna’s “virginity” on p. 234.
5. How is Christmas’s liaison with Burden different from his prior (extensive) sexual experience?  What are some of the roles that each plays in their relationship?
6. Burden’s backstory is seemingly rather remote from the novel’s plot.  What are some ways that the story’s themes link up with the themes of the novel, or of the part of the novel that we’ve read?  How does this sketch of 19thC US history, told via a single family, inform this novel that’s very much written in the present tense as of 1932?
7. What is the “curse” that killed the two Calvin Burdens?  How does this curse differ for blacks and whites, in Burden’s telling?  How do Joanna’s and Christmas’s analyses of this curse differ?
8. Chapter 12 begins with Christmas feeling as if he’d fallen into a “sewer” that “only ran by night”?  What are the implications of this metaphor?  How does this linkage of sex and filth link up with the novel’s broader themes?
9. Why can’t Burden and Christmas get married (see 265)?  Note that marriage in the novel genre is a central site of resolution of plot; thus, the narrative “fork” marry/refuse marriage determines the possible outcomes of the entire novel, in a sense.  What possibilities are embraced/foreclosed as the characters navigate this fork?  What kinds of things are bundled (so to speak) with this offer of marriage, and how are they significant?
10. What does Joanna’s pistol mean?  How is it a fitting symbol of her life, and of her relationship with Christmas?  How do you read the final scene between Christmas and Burden, and how does this entire flashback recontextualize chapter 5?
11. On 301, Hightower tells Bunch, “I am not in life anymore” and thus won’t get involved in Bunch’s schemes with regard to Grove and Brown/Burch.  What are some of the ways that Bunch, and the plot of the novel more broadly, pull Hightower into life and, figuratively, out of his tower?
12. Christmas’s clever ploy to avoid the hounds who chase him involves trading shoes with an old black woman.  The “brogans” are utterly ordinary in a sense but become uncanny objects before Christmas’s eyes. Why?  What do these shoes signify for Christmas and, perhaps, for us readers?
13. On 349 ff.,  the long backstory of Christmas is related by “the town.”  What kind of narrator is the town, so to speak?  Why do you think Faulkner features the town’s version of events to narrate Christmas’s capture?
14. On p. 374, the Hineses (and Bunch) relate the story of Christmas’s origins.  This story should contain the kernel of the novel, the answer to the main question that animates so many of its characters: what kind of “blood” does Christmas have?  What kinds of answers do we get?  How do those answers, such as they are, feed back into the novel and condition its final 100 pp.?
15. On 404, we get Hightower’s account of, with apologies to Terry McMillan, how he got his groove back.  What is it exactly that has given him “a glow, a wave, a surge of something almost hot”?  What are some of the ways this “glow” manifests in, for example, his behavior, his choice of reading material, his thoughts, his memories?
16. After arranging to have the police bring Burch to Lena, Bunch rides his mule to the crest of a hill where he views the entire landscape, including the old Burden place, “broken now by negro cabins and garden patches” and more.  How does space do the work of time here, telling a story about the county’s history?  What is the story of Reconstruction that is inscribed, so to speak, in the landscape?  See 424-5.
17. Faulkner once claimed (well, bragged) that he “created a Nazi before Hitler did” in the person of Percy Grimm.  What are some of the ways that Grimm reflects the rise of fascist political movements in the 1920s and 30s both abroad and in the US?
18. How do you read Christmas’s death scene?  Pay particular attention to the imagery that is clustered around his body upon his death: blood, blackness, the “rocket,” etc.

[on chs 20-21]

1. What does Hightower’s father’s cloak mean?  What kind of narrative of the Civil War emerges from it, as opposed to the “cavalier” image of Hightower’s grandfather raiding the Union Army’s commissary?  What is at stake in Hightower’s reexamination (recollection) of his relationship to his father, his grandfather, his mother, and his “mammy”?
2. How do you read the end of the novel?  Why does the novel end with Lena and Bunch, rather than with Christmas’s death, a much more obvious point of denouement?  Why the decision to tell the end of the novel from the perspective of an unnamed traveling salesman with no relation to the events of the novel?