Yale professor Wai Chee Dimock closes her course on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner with a final session on Light in August. She argues that Faulkner maps Calvinist predestination onto race, using Nella Larsen's Passing as an intertext to explain Joe Christmas's self-blackening as an expression of his sense of always coming second. She traces the novel's recurring image of a struck match as a symbolic pattern tied to Christmas's fate, then turns to Hightower's delivery of Lena's baby as a scene poised between tragedy and comedy, giving him a second chance at communal belonging. The lecture ends with Lena Grove and Byron Bunch's courtship read as the novel's comic resolution, and with Faulkner's broader view of marriage and the kindness of strangers. Recorded at Yale in fall 2011, part of the Open Yale Courses series.