Tag Archives: Byron Bunch

4. The Misplaced Confidant

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In chapter 3, Byron Bunch recounts the story he is told of Hightower’s history in Jefferson. He is completely aware of the infidelity of Hightower’s wife and how she died. Considering this, it is odd that of all people he should choose to talk to about Lena Grove and his increasing feelings for her, he chose Hightower. With the stigma associated with cuckholds, and Lena’s search for the father of her unborn child being mildly obstructed by Byron, Hightower would be the least likely to sympathize with him. This can be seen when Byron tells Hightower about how he convinced Lena to wait with him at the mill instead of searching for Brown where the Burden house was burning. Hightower’s response is telling:

“’You did what you could. All that any stranger would be expected to do. Unless…’ His voice ceases also. Then it dies away on that inflection… And opposite Byron, Hightower does not yet think love. He remembers only that Byron is still young and has led a life of celibacy and hard labor, and that by Byron’s telling the woman whom he has never seen possesses some disturbing quality at least, even though Byron still believes that it is only pity. So he watches Byron now with a certain narrowness neither cold nor warm” (LIA 82).

There is a buildup happening here. Hightower assumes that Byron is unaware of his feelings toward Lena, but still describes Bryon’s dealings with her as disturbing. Hightower then begins to listen to the story with this in mind. After Byron tells how he decided to have Lena stay at the same boarding house as him, Hightower becomes increasingly suspicious:

“And now there begins to come into Hightower’s puzzled expression a quality of shrinking and foreboding as Byron talks quietly, telling about how he decided after they reaches the square to take Lena on to Mrs. Beard’s” (LIA 82-83).

While Byron may not be aware of his feelings for Lena as Hightower assumes, it is very odd that Byron wouldn’t consider to whom he is speaking to about bringing a woman who is pregnant with another man’s child to live close to him. Especially considering how similar assumptions of sexual relationships were presumed by the town about Hightower and his African American servants. Even more so in the case of the African American baby he delivered that died and the town had assumed that it was his child (LIA 74). Even if Byron did not realize he was in love with Lena yet, surely, he is aware of the negativity associated with taking care of a single pregnant woman whose child is not his and how Hightower’s bitter history would not make him the most sympathetic listener. One has to wonder what Byron was thinking in confessing to Hightower.

In my opinion, there are two options. Either Byron’s isolation from the town has caused him to lack the social skills to understand that he is hitting a sore spot by confessing this issue to Hightower. Or he is fully aware and even expects Hightower to give him biased feedback. The second option would make sense because Byron is a religious man and is described as being part of a church choir (LIA 48). Perhaps Byron believes that having someone who is both a priest and who has a bitter history with infidelity might dissuade him from what he might view as sin. That being getting involved with a woman who has a connection with another man. This is the more likely case, and if so, then Byron certainly is pushing his limits which shows something about his character. It shows that it is not a priority for Byron to maintain his personal relationships. His motivation is purely that of internal introspection without regard for outside influences. His isolation and working on Saturdays (LIA 47) is further evidence of this.  

Unmoored from Time

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Light in August has a fixation on time similar to that permeating The Sound and the Fury, although perhaps not to the level of obsession present in the latter. This focus is apparent in the novel’s exploration of some of its outsider characters’ interactions with time as a societal construct, Gail Hightower being a prime example. The characterization of Joe Christmas and Byron Bunch allows for an exploration of time as it intertwines with nature. Both of these characters display an inability to align themselves with time as well as nature, in which there is an absence of society’s conception of time and in which one might speculate that these outsiders could create a space for themselves.

Hightower is able to create his own sense of time, albeit one based on society’s construction of it, a vestige of his time spent “in life.” He uses this internalized sense of time to maintain a thread to this past life, particularly his time spent as minister of the church that he maintains within his periphery. Although enclosed within his home, Hightower remains alert to the emanation of music from the church during services: “He knows almost to the second when he should begin to hear it, without recourse to watch or clock. He uses neither, has needed neither for twentyfive years now. He lives dissociated from mechanical time. Yet for that reason he has never lost it” (366). Furthermore, “Without recourse to clock he could know immediately upon the thought just where, in his old life, he would be and what doing between the two fixed moments which marked the beginning and the end of Sunday morning service and Sunday evening service and prayer service on Wednesday night” (366). These threads thus have a double nature: they add a ghostlike, haunting presence to Hightower’s existence but are also sacrosanct for Hightower, revealing the contradictions inherent in his supposed isolation from the outside world.

Christmas’s contentious relationship with time and nature is at its most apparent during his brief attempt at escape after the murder of Joanna Burden. Within this short period, during which he exists off the grid, traveling through forests and living off the land, Christmas becomes completely disconnected from time, his state reflecting his status in society: a position on the margins. As we are told during this period, “He is not sleepy or hungry or even tired. He is somewhere between and among them, suspended, swaying to the motion of the wagon without thought, without feeling. He has lost account of time and distance; perhaps it is an hour later, perhaps three” (339). The reader also loses track of time along with Christmas; I found myself surprised to realize he had only been gone for a week or so before his capture. At the same time, he is paradoxically unable to become one with nature. We are told that “For a week now he has lurked and crept among its secret places, yet he remained a foreigner to the very immutable laws which earth must obey” (338). Thus, Christmas is a “foreigner” even when alone in nature and far from other people, unable to belong anywhere.

Like Christmas, Byron, upon quitting his job at the mill and briefly leaving Jefferson to start anew outside the town where he never truly belonged (although, as with Christmas, this is partially by choice), he finds himself becoming unmoored from time and also unable to feel at home in the land that surrounds him as he begins his journey. From the crest of a hill, he muses on nature’s indifference to him, not unlike Jefferson’s indifference to him:

But then from beyond the hill crest there begins to rise that which he knows is there: the trees which are trees, the terrific and tedious distance which, being moved by blood, he must compass forever and ever between two inescapable horizons of the implacable earth. Steadily they rise, not portentous, not threatful. That’s it. They are oblivious of him. ‘Don’t know and don’t care,’ he thinks. (424)

He is only roused during the events that follow and brought back into time by the sound of a train whistle. After his fight with Joe Brown/Lucas Burch, the train that will provide escape for Brown/Burch approaches and startles him awake, causing him to think, “this is the world and time too” (440). But this awakening is only temporary. Perhaps in his wanderings with Lena he will find belonging through constant movement.