Stylistic Analysis. Sample 1. Sample 2. Sample 3. Stylistic Analysis of a Novel

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Stylistic Analysis

Sample 1

 We can analyse any kind of text. A stylistic analysis of a road sign which reads NO LEFT TURN might make the following observations.

• The statement is a command.
• It is cast in the imperative mode.
• The statement lacks a subject and a verb.
• These are implied [THERE IS].
• The statement is unpunctuated.
• Capitals have been used for emphasis.
• Simple vocabulary to suit wide audience.
• Extreme compression for rapid comprehension.
• Form entirely suited to audience and function.

Sample 2

The opening lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

A stylistic analysis might reveal the following points:

• the play is written in poetic blank verse
• that is — unrhymed, iambic pentameters
• the stresses fall as follows
• Now /i/s the w/i/nter /o/f our d/i/scont/e/nt
• [notice that the stress falls on vowel sounds]
• the first line is built on a metaphor
• the condition of England is described in terms of the season ‘winter’
• the term ‘our’ is a form of the royal ‘we’
• the seasonal metaphor is extended into the second line …
• … where better conditions become ‘summer’
• the metaphor is extended even further by the term ‘sun’
• it is the sun which appears, ‘causing’ the summer
• but ‘sun’ is here also a pun – on the term ‘son’…
• … which refers to the son of the King
• ‘York’ is a metonymic reference to the Duke of York

Sample 3

Text:

Alex La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird. (a) When the government trucks had gone, the dust they had left behind hung over the plain and smudged the blistering afternoon sun so that it appeared as a daub of white-hot metal through the moving haze. (b) The dust hung in the sky for some time before settling down on the white plain. (c) The plain was flat and featureless except for two roads bull-dozed from the ground, bisecting each other to lie like scars of a branded cross on the pocked and powdered skin of the earth. (d) In the distance a new water tank on metal stilts jutted like an iron glove clenched against the empty sky. (e) The dust settled slowly on the metal of the tank and on the surface of the brackish water it contained, laboriously pumped up from below the sand; on the rough cubist mounds of folded and piled tents dumped there by officialdom; on the sullen faces of the people who had been unloaded like the odds and ends of furniture they had been allowed to bring with them, powdering them grey and settling in the perspiring lines around mouths and in the eye sockets, settling on the unkempt and travel-creased clothes, so that they had the look of scarecrows left behind, abandoned in this place. (f) This was no land for ploughing and sowing; it was not even good enough to be buried in.

Stylistic analysis of the text:

This text is a sample of literature by an African writer. The author is Alex la Guma, who was born and lived in South Africa. He was one of the defendants in the Treason Trials of 1956 and was kept under house arrest for four years; eventually he was forced into exile and lived outside Africa. He used literature as a means of seeking to understand the painful racial divisions of South Africa during the dark years of apartheid. This sample appears at the beginning of his novel Time of the Butcherbird (London: Heinemann, 1979), page 1.

The theme of this opening part of the novel is a typical one in African literature: the relationship between the landscape (outside) and the thoughts and feelings of the Africans themselves (inside). This particular landscape is a nightmare of ugliness at which the people ‘dumped’ there can only stare in dull horror, and the reader is intended to share those feelings. As we only find out later on in the novel, they have just been moved by ‘government trucks’ because white people wanted their own traditional homelands — a frequent occurrence in South Africa in those days. Now they are ‘abandoned’ in a place nobody could want. The ugliness of the scene symbolises and underscores the apartheid regime’s horrendous disregard for the human rights of African citizens.

In keeping with this topic is a set of interconnected thematic chains. One of these chains features the ‘dust’: ‘dust - haze - dust - powdered - dust - sand - powdering’. Another chain features what the ‘dust’ did, as if it, rather than the people, were the main character making things happen: ‘hung over - smudged - moving - hung - settled slowly - powdering grey - settling - settling’. And a third chain features the ‘plain’: ‘plain - plain - plain - flat - featureless - roads - ground - earth - place’. Nearly all of these lexicalchoices are decidedly common and ‘plain’ themselves, keeping the style itself ‘flat’ and ‘featureless’. Moreover, the repetitions or recurrences of ‘dust’, ‘settle’, and ‘plain’ are iconic in acting out the endless monotony of the scene.

The term ‘featureless’ (line 4) is the most obvious exception in standing out against the rest by being an uncommon lexical choice. But it is an ironic ‘feature’ because it actually denies the presence of ‘features’. The Verb ‘powdering’ (lines 6, 11) is not uncommon in itself, but its common use is for what people do, not for dust; it fits in here with appropriate irony, since people put on powder to look better yet this dust makes the people look much worse — in fact, no longer like humans but ‘scarecrows’ (line 13).

Another main thematic chain is for the heat: ‘blistering - afternoon - white-hot - perspiring’, the last one of these connecting back to the what the people did. This chain also connects to the ‘sand’ and the ‘dust’ and gives the reader keen sensoryimpressions of the desert-like conditions, so as to identify better with the feelings of the people ‘dumped’ there.

The other main thematic chains are also all associated with the ‘dust’ in one way or another. The ‘government’ and ‘officialdom’ responsible for the whole situation started off ‘leaving dust behind’ and performed a series of arbitrary and unfeeling actions: ‘pumped - dumped (rhyme and assonance) - unloaded - abandoned’, of which the last item, ‘abandoned’ (14) is their final symbolic gesture of how they treat Africans. We have another thematic chain for mechanical, hard objects and actions associated with the power of the government: ‘trucks (also involved in ‘leaving dust behind’) - roads - bull-dozed - water tank - metal stilts - iron - metal - tank’. The ‘tank’ is especially significant, placed as an alibi for ‘abandoning’ people where they might otherwise die of thirst that same day and ironically symbolising, by the simile ‘jutted like an iron glove’, both the brutal power of the government and the anger of these people whose own fists are as useless as if ‘clenched against the empty sky’ (7).

Also significant are the stylistic choices whereby the ‘dumped’ people appear only in pieces: ‘sullen faces - mouths - eye sockets’, as if they were already becoming skeletons whose ‘mouths’ and ‘eye sockets’ really are filled with ‘dust’. These choices link up with the sharply painful metaphors of personification or animation for the landscape injured by the ‘scars of a branded cross on the pocked and powdered skin’ (5-6).

The actions of the ‘dumped’ people are limited to having ‘folded and piled’ their ‘tents (9-10), having ‘brought’ their ‘allowed furniture’ (11), and now just ‘perspiring’ (12), an action with almost no movement. They know they will never be ‘ploughing’ or sowing’, and all that awaits them is being ‘buried’ in this ‘land’ that is ‘not even good enough’ (14-15) for that humble, deathly purpose. Particularly ironic is the metaphor of the ‘scarecrows’ (13): on the one hand, these are figures with no life and dressed in rags; on the other hand, there will be no crops grown here from which any ‘crows’ should be ‘scared’ away.

Irony can also be found in the pitifully meagre possessions of the people: ‘folded and piled tents - odds and ends of furniture - unkempt and travel-creased clothes’. They have been brought a long way in the ‘trucks’ with the barest minimum for surviving in filth and misery. The only ‘new’ thing is the sinister ‘water tank’ for which dusty, bad-tasting ('brackish’, literally salty) water has been ‘pumped up’ here (6-9) in an ironic reverse motion of their own ‘burial’ (15). And as we saw, the tank starkly symbolises the ‘iron glove’ of brutal government power.

The stylistic choice ‘cubist’ (9) is the most marked in the whole sample. It is a rare word in English and refers to a modernist style of art introduced in the early twentieth century. As the name suggests, ‘cubism’ represents objects and even humans as patterns of geometrical shapes, including ‘cubes’. The reader faces some challenge deciding just how this exceptional stylistic indicator could be connected with the rest. It seems to form a thematic chain with ‘bisecting’ (4), ‘cross’ (5), and ‘lines’ (10). Also, it may be intended to frame the whole scene like a surrealist painting, as if the humans were no longer in the real world. We might imagine the conversion of humans into lifeless flat shapes, and of the whole scene into an abstract pattern of colours and surfaces. We might detect here the further irony that the resulting art object is a study in ugliness rather than the study in beauty we expect from art.

We have now examined multiple motives for the stylistic choices in the sample text. Taken all together, they produce an effect far more impressive and moving than any description of the same scene in ordinary, careless style. Since this scene occurs at the start of the novel, its full impact comes into effect only gradually, like ‘dust settling’ over the entire canvas of South African life. For that purpose, the author chose a style he hoped would keep the scene clearly in the reader’s memory.

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