They saw that the man was not dead yet, and when they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit. Then Grimm too sprang back, flinging behind him the bloody butcher knife. "Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell," he said. But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with his eyes open and empty of everything save consciousness, and with something, a shadow, about his mouth. For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant. (Chapter 19)

Basic set up:

Toward the end of Light in August, a group of white men chase down Joe Christmas, a part-African American character who has slept with a white woman. The white men kill him, but before he dies, one of them castrates him.

All the violence of racial oppression is captured in the above passage. For these white men, it's not enough just to kill Christmas—they have to castrate him, too. This kind of violence isn't just about taking a man's life; it's about killing him in a way that completely strips him of his dignity.

By focusing on violence in such a graphic way, Faulkner is setting it as one of the central themes in Light in August. In fact, violence is central to all his work.

Even though this scene is totally graphic, if you zoom in on the language the narrator uses, you'll notice that the narrator never actually uses any graphic words. There's a castration going on here, but do you see any explicit mention of testicles here? Nope.

What Faulkner does do is use imagery in such a way that we can see the castration, even though the narrator never even says the word "castration." For instance: "[F]rom out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket."

This imagery is powerful because it makes us see and understand the horror of the scene in a way that simply saying "they castrated him" might not do; this imagery is disturbing and haunting and revolting all at once. Faulkner's description conveys the whole extent of the violence without actually naming that violence as castration.