Show me Love

Show me Love

Show me Love
In William Faulkner’s Light in August, Faulkner shows the reader the many relationships of   Joe Christmas.   The reader is presented the unsuccessful relationships that Christmas has with his parents and grandparents, the people at the orphanage, McEachern and his wife, the waitress, and Miss Burden.   Joe Christmas does not receive true love from any of them, and in turn has never learned how to love.   Faulkner is showing the reader that if you have never been loved, it is impossible to love anyone else, including yourself.
  While most people receive at least some love from their parents, Christmas does not receive any.   Christmas may not know the origin of his birth, but he knows that his parents abandoned him.   This would obviously lead to difficulty in loving yourself, as if your parents did not love you, why should you love yourself?   By making Christmas an orphan who has no knowledge of his origin, Faulkner is beginning to show the reader how Christmas has never received any love.   It is important to notice that not knowing his origin, Christmas does not make one up.   He does not pretend that his father is a war hero or some such story; in fact, he does not think about his parents at all.   If Christmas had his parents as role models, he would have to have goals for himself.   Since he has no love for himself, he cannot set goals, since this would force him to believe that he has some self value.   By not showing Christmas to have any goals for himself, Faulkner once again showing us the nature of love.   Since he was never loved, he is incapable of loving anyone else.
In Christmas’s life, there are only two people who have ever attempted to give him any kind of love.   The first of these people was Alice, of whom the reader is told that "He had liked her, enough to let her mother him a little; perhaps because of it.   And so to him she was as mature, almost as large in size, as the adult women who ordered his eating and washing and sleeping,...