Faulkner's Style

• That internal human mental and emotional processes are significant, perhaps even more so than external activity.
• That this is a disjointed, even illogical, existence.
• That because it is associative, it follows a seemingly random pattern of free psychological images and emotions.

(taken from Harmon and Holman, 7th edition.)

How does Faulkner use a quasi-stream of consciousness style to represent the struggle and determination of Ike to uncover, resist, and reject the sins of his ancestors?

Faulkner's Use of the Sentence

• The long sentence is built up through colons, semicolons, dashes, and parentheses.
• The vocabulary evokes an older morality and a realm of high romance.
• The allusions are to romantic episodes in history and literature.
• The sentence employs a negative or series of negatives followed by a positive.
• Synonyms are built up through repetition.
• Words often have a symbolic or poetic extension.
• The passage reaches out for metaphors or similes which may be foreign to the vehicle from which they originate.
• The sentence often breaks with standard grammatical forms; sometimes solecisims.
• Paradox is often present.
• Adjectives are piled up.
• Two words often merge into one.
• A generous use of hyphenated words.

As William Van O'Connor notes, "For Faulkner the chief unit is the sentence."

[Taken from O'Connor, William Van, "Style and Meaning in Faulkner's Work."]

A Few Other Observations

• Faulkner seeks to be comprehensive, not only in his use of history, setting, and characterization, but also in his themes, symbols, and emotions.
• He layers his associations so that one is not sure where to stop or pause.  Everything is connected with everything.
• His style gives us a sense that psychological time, as well as the time inherent in cultural heritage, is more condensed than historical time.