more accessible than many of the other novels. It is relatively free from the amorphous, "spastic, breathless quality of the sentences to be found in Absalom, Absalom!" (Volpe 152), and the shifts from present to past pose little difficulty.
The real substance of the novel lies in its theme. Speaking of one of the novel's central characters, Joe Christmas, who is doomed never to know his true racial identity, Faulkner said, "that, to me, was the tragic central idea of the story that he didn't know what he was, and there was no way possible in life for him to find out" (Blotner 301).
Critical interpretations bring forth other themes as well. Edmond L. Volpe, in his Reader's Guide to Faulkner, sees the novel's subject as the "crippling clutch of abstract concepts upon the mind and soul of the human being" (173). These "abstract concepts" may be interpreted as the repressive tenets of strict Protestantism or the mass hysteria of racism. Not knowing his true racial identity, Joe is doomed to
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