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Because stylistic analysis is generally carried out by isolating and examining one or more representative passages from a given work, the following examples may prove illustrative.
1. During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of unsufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say unsufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.
From “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Edgar Allan Poe (1839)
Stylistic analysis: In this first paragraph of the story, the unnamed narrator, Roderick Usher’s boyhood acquaintance, first approaches the melancholy and decaying house. Poe’s obvious intent is to establish, from the outset, the appropriate setting and atmosphere for the story – one that will simultaneously arrest the reader’s attention and evoke an appropriate emotional response. The opening sentence, surely one of the most famous in all of American literature, is a long periodic one, in which a series of rhythmic phrases and clauses are deliberately arranged to suspend, until the very end, and so prepare the way for, the object for the narrator’s search. Within the sentence, Poe carefully intensifies his visual details with adjectives and adverbs and reinforces their effect through the use of alliteration and onomatopoeia. The second and third sentences, which record the narrator’s response to the scene, continue to invite the reader in the same way. Poe’s emotion-charged prose is clearly excessive (note the use of such words as “oppressively”, “dreary”, “melancholy”, “unsufferable”, “half-pleasurable”, “sternest”, “desolate”, and “terrible”), yet its very excess effectively establishes the mood that is to dominate and surround the story from beginning to end.
2. when the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinner. When we met in the street the houses had grown somber. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed, our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odors arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out of the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.
From “Araby”, James Joyce (1914)
Stylistic analysis: Joyce’s Araby is a love story, told, retrospectively, by an older and presumably wiser, adult looking backwards on a bittersweet moment of adolescence. In the third paragraph of the story, Joyce describes the Dublin neighbourhood (North Richmond Street) that makes up the boy’s physical world. The details he uses are less important for their concrete, denotative qualities, however, than for the way they capture and reflect the boy’s own subjective appreciation of life and its sensual pleasures. What Joyce provides is a series of rich, lyrical, and evocative images which appeal to the eye, to the touch, to the ear, and to the nose, as well as kinetic images which convey a sense of life in motion – images that are made all the more alive and poetic because the seem to spring from the crowded associations of memory. Joyce also employs a number of the devices we normally expect to find in poetry: personification, metaphor, and distinctive patterns of rhythm and sound. Note, for example, the final sentence describing “Mangan’s sister”, upon whom the focus of the passage finally and fittingly comes to rest, where the swinging of her dress and the tossing metaphoric “rope” of her hair are emphasized by swishing alliterative “s” sounds that are used to suggest the hypnotic and sensual appeal she exercises on the imagination of a young man caught up in the infatuation of first love.
3. The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.
“And we could have all this”, she said. “And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.”
“What did you say?”
“I said we could have everything.”
“We can have everything.”
“We can have the whole world.”
“No, we can’t.”
“We can go everywhere.”
“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.”
“it’s ours.”
“No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”
“But they haven’t taken it away.”
“We’ll wait and see.”
“Come on back in the shade,” he said. “You mustn’t feel that way.”
“I don’t feel any way,” the girl said. “I just know things.”
From “Hills Like White Elephants”, Ernest Hemingway (1927)
Stylistic analysis: the passage perfectly illustrates the famous Hemingway’s style – economical and terse. It is characterized by short, simple sentences and active verbs; by an informal, commonplace vocabulary of short, denotative words; the absence of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs; and by a concentration on particular concrete images that record the surface level of experience. Descriptive details of setting are sparse though important – in this case they juxtapose the sensuous fertility across the river with the hot sterile foreground where the conversation between the two characters takes place. Such details, however, are clearly subordinate to the dialogue, which carries the narrative movement of the story and explores and illuminates the attitudes and temperaments of the character-participants. The objective point of view places the burden of interpretation on the reader, who must pay close attention to what is being said in order to identify correctly the verbal nuances and overtones that define both character and conflict.
The dialogue itself is difficult to follow. It is random, indirect, and inexplicit, for Hemingway’s characters, aware as they are that to expose oneself openly is to risk psychic injury, tend to approach each other obliquely, their real thoughts and emotions hidden and held tightly in check. In this passage, the girl senses, though she cannot or will not articulate the fact, that it is not the matter of her pregnancy – or the ”awfully simple operation” he proposes – that jeopardizes their relationship, but rather his failure to understand that human relationships themselves inevitably curtail and limit one’s freedom. Her inability to communicate this message and his failure to understand it – the failure of dialogue, if you will – thus serves to underscore and explain both the differences in their attitudes and personalities and the size of the barrier existing between them.
Tone
All of us are familiar with the term tone as it is used to characterize the special qualities of accent, inflection, and duration of a speaker’s voice. From an early childhood on we learn to identify and respond to these elements of speech. For example, a mother can tell her child to “Come here!” in a manner that is angry, threatening, concerned, amused, sympathetic, or affectionate, simply by altering her tone of voice. In each case, the mother’s meaning is the same – she wants her child to come. However, the relationship she creates with her auditor (the child) will differ dramatically according to her tone. Tone, then, is a means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude. The particular qualities of a speaking voice are unavailable to a writer in creating tone, but to a certain extent rhythm and punctuation can substitute for a speaker’s accent and inflection, while the word order and word choice can influence tone as easily in prose as in speech. Just as the tone of the mother’s voice communicates her attitude of anger or concern, so tone in fiction is frequently a guide to an author’s attitude toward the subject or audience. For example, one recognizes at once the friendly, informal, and folksy tone of Huck Finn’s introduction to his adventures:
You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’, but that ain’t no matter.
Huck wants to make us his friends, so he writes just as he would speak, without striving for grammatical perfection. As soon as he realizes that we might be put off by the sense of self-importance in his allusion to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he reassures us that it “ain’t no matter” if we have failed to read the book. The tone and content of the sentences combine to indicate that Huck wants us to like him and that he wants to like us. In contrast, in Mark Twain’s preface to Huckleberry Finn his tone is threatening at the same time that is ironic and humorous:
NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
Per G.G., SHEF OF ORDNANCE
We are not accustomed to such threats from authors, and our first reaction might be shock – after that, perhaps confusion. Why should Mark Twain make threats that are obviously exaggerated and impossible to carry out? Why, indeed, except to attract our attention to the novel’s motive, moral and plot. We may be amused by the author’s obvious antipathy to literary critics and literary criticism, but we may also feel slightly goaded, a bit more eager to look for a motive, moral and plot anywhere we damned well please! And after a moment we may recognize that Mark Twain’s purpose in including this notice must have been to obtain such a reaction; he forbids us to examine his book’s literary meaning in order suggest ironically that it does have serious literary purposes. Thus, although Huck’s tone has accurately reflected his attitude toward the reader, it is doubtful that the same is true of Mark Twain’s “Notice”. His tone is ironic and he means just the opposite of what he says.
As these examples indicate, an author’s tone is linked closely to intention and meaning; the tone must be inferred from a close and careful study of the various elements within the work, including plot, character, setting, point of view and style.
No matter how hard an author tries to mask his attitudes and feelings, and to hide his presence within the work, perhaps by taking refuge somewhere behind the narrative voice that tells the story, the author’s tone can be inferred by the choices he makes in the process of ordering and presenting his material: by what is included and emphasized and what, by contrast, is omitted. In such choices lie what Wayne Booth refers to as “the implicit evaluation which the author manages to convey behind his explicit presentation.” The literary critic learns to look at such choices carefully – at the characters, incidents, settings, and details depicted: at the issues and problems that are raised and explored; at the style the author has employed; at every decision, in short, that the author has made – in order to infer from them the underlying attitudes and tone that color and control the work as a whole. The task is not at all an easy one, and for this reason tone is perhaps the most difficult and elusive of all the literary elements we have thus far discussed.
IRONY. When Huckleberry Finn steps forward to introduce himself, he is both frank and open, and there is little reason to believe that he means anything other than what he says. The same thing, however, is not always true of Mark Twain himself, who is far more circumspect and cautious and prefers to adopt a posture of detachment and objectivity. Authors like Mark Twain recognize that life is not always simple or straightforward; that the affairs of men are full of surprises, ambiguities, contradictions, and complexities; and that appearances can and often do deceive. In order to reflect the puzzling, problematic nature of experience, such authors choose to approach their subjects indirectly, through the use of irony. They use techniques to create within a work two separate and contrasting levels of experience and a “disparity of understanding” between them.
The three types of irony that occur most frequently in literature are verbal irony (in which there is a contrast between what a speaker literally says and what he or she means); irony of situation (in which an event or situation turns out to be the reverse of what is expected or appropriate); and dramatic irony (in which the state of affairs known to the reader or audience is the reverse of what its participants suppose it to be).
Verbal irony is easily enough recognized in speech because of the intonation of the speaker’s voice. For example, when Mark Anthony refers to Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as “an honorable man”, few members of the audience are likely to misunderstand the irony in his statement. When used in fiction, however, verbal irony is sometimes more difficult to identify because it is conveyed exclusively through the author’s style, through the words on the printed page. Sometimes the author helps the reader by means of repetition, as Hawthorne does in My Kinsman, Major Molineux, where robin, the uninitiated youth from the country, prides himself on his native “shrewdness”. Shrewd, at least in the ways of the city, Robin is most certainly not.
Irony of situation, on the other hand, results from the careful manipulation of plot, point of view, setting and atmosphere. Robin’s prolonged and frustrating search for his kinsman, for example, is rendered ironic by the fact that object is the very individual who Robin believes will help him to rise in the world. Robin Molineux is but one in a long line of fictional characters whose expectations are altered or reversed by the events that overtake him. The situational irony in Hawthorne’s story is sustained not only by the plot, but by the point of view, which reveals the true state of things only gradually both to Robin and the reader.
Dramatic irony, like irony of situation, depends on the use of plot, character, and point of view. An omniscient narrator, for example, will sometimes reveal information to the reader that his character does not yet know; this allows the narrator (and the reader) to judge the subsequent actions of those characters and anticipate the likely outcome of events. Dramatic irony can also be established by means of characters whose innocence and naivety cause them to misperceive events whose significance is perfectly clear to the reader. The plots of such works frequently turn on the matter of knowing or not knowing, as in Henry James’ The Tree of Knowledge, and result in outcomes that are either comic or tragic in their final implication. As critics Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg note, there are “In any example of narrative art … broadly speaking, three points of view – those of the characters, the narrator and the audience.” When any of the three “perceives more – or less – than another, irony must be either actually or potentially present.” In any work of fiction, it is crucially important that we are able to determine if and how that potential ahs been exploited; to overlook or to misinterpret the presence of irony can only lead to a misinterpretation of the author’s attitudes and tone and the way he would have us approach and judge the work.
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