Byron Bunch

One of the major characters in Light in August, Bryon Bunch is a "small man who will not see thirty again" (47). He came to Jefferson seven years before the novel begins, and leaves the town before it ends. The bookkeeper at the planing mill where he works calls him a "hillbilly" (413). While in Jefferson, for six days every week he is a steady, dependable worker in the mill; every Sunday he directs a country church choir. Scrupulously honest with himself and others, Byron is also a sweet-tempered man. When Lena Grove appears at the mill in search of Lucas Burch, Byron instantly and "contrary to all the tradition of his austere and jealous country raising" (49) falls in love with her; at first, his love disrupts the pattern of his previous life as he becomes her self-appointed protector; at last, although the ending of his story remains open, it seems that love enables him to escape the past - something that seldom happens in Faulkner's fictions.