Growth and change may finally be seen as possibilities within time, and time is the novel’s third great theme. Gil speaks for the future: his personal future, the future of the South, and, one may suppose, the future of the nation. Yet his father’s words of rejection threaten to cut Gil off from his own past. Fix proves capable of emancipating himself from the destructive patterns of the past, yet his rejection of Gil gives voice to the pain of a man who has lived beyond his time. Luke Will ignorantly, compulsively, and destructively repeats the patterns of the past. Candy, more ambiguously and more positively, brings the paternalistic values of a sentimentalized and idealized past to bear on the present situation. The old men, who have so little time, find in their relation to the past, especially as symbolized in the graveyard scene, a source of strength and community.