SOURCE: Jarraway, David R. “The Gothic Import of Faulkner's ‘Black Son’ in Light in August.” In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, pp. 57-74. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Jarraway explores gothic identity in Light in August in terms of Julia Kristeva's post-Freudian psychoanalysis.

How much does it cost the subject to be able to tell the truth about itself?

—Michel Foucault, Foucault Live

I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you … It [is], as you say, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. But the truth, I would like to think, comes out, that when the reader has read all these thirteen different ways of looking at the blackbird, the reader has his own fourteenth image of that blackbird which I would like to think is the...