NCHS AP English Language

Hannah Robinson: Chpt 4 intersections

Within chapter four Faulkner introduces more the lives of three characters. These three characters lives intersect within the town and story. One of the first characters Faulkner tells us about is Joe Christmas. Christmas has lived in Jefferson for six years. He worked at the town mill, until he quit from the money he made bootlegging alcohol. Christmas is believed to live behind Miss Burden; and according to Brown, he has been carrying on a relationship with her. Brown another character we find out more about came to Jefferson about three years ago, and ends up working at the same mill as Christmas. Christmas and Brown become friends and begin bootlegging and living together, he therefore quits his job also. Brown when arrested for the murder and vandilization with fire of Miss Burden accusing Christmas of killing her and being a mulatto. Miss Burden, the last of the three related characters of this chapter, is an older women, who has had troubles and burdens in her life for the past 60 years. She is the women who is murdered and her house set on fire.
The relationship I found between these three characters in the chapter is with the relationship between Christmas and Burden, true or fiction; whether Brown or Christmas really killed her. The relationship with time I found was that you can't change the past. Brown tells a story about Christmas, and what he says can never be taken back. People however forget much of what is actually said in the past. When people talk many times past becomes fictional. It is true that the present is only 1/4 to 1/5 of a second. What is true and what is false in this story may become intertangled because the past is never 100% accurate.

Hannah Robinson

posted by NCHS AP English Language III @ 5:48 PM