"In one sense," Andre Bleikasten observes, "Light in August is nothing less and nothing more than a hazardous unriddling of names." Faulkner illustrates "the tenuous, arbitrary relation of names to the named" through the unease Joe Christmas's name causes other characters and through the confusion circulating around Lucas Burch, Joe Brown, and Byron Bunch (Bleikasten 333-34).
Here are several more titles, perhaps the most surprising of all, since they entailed not only a leap of twenty centuries but mastery of another ideational world: The Unriddling of Christian Origins: A Secular Account; The Birth of Christianity: Reality and Myth; The Death of Jesus.
It is an optimistic work in the sense that the artist evidently believes there exists an audience out there of the kind Bronzino could count on to enjoy unriddling allegories while admiring the craft.