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Stylistic Analysis
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.”
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