Faulkner's style differs from his fantastic novels, which feature stream-of-conscious narratives in his short tales. However, several of the literary methods used in his books are also used in the stories. They include extended descriptions and details, actions in one scene that then recall a past or future scene, and complex sentence structure. It's vital to remember that when Faulkner chooses which style technique to use in his stories, he does so with a specific goal in mind: The narrative devices reflect the psychological complexity of the people and places in the short stories through William Faulkner's vision.
Long descriptions are one of the most efficient ways for Faulkner to establish the depth of character and scene. A description of a character will often follow a description of an object: As a result of their comparable descriptions, the thing and the character take on each other's appearance. "It was a vast, squarish frame home that had previously been white. ornamented with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, placed on what had formerly been our most choice street," Faulkner writes at the beginning of "A Rose for Emily." We can read inspiring stories about William Faulkner in Japan through his books. If you are a literature lover and want to know more about Faulkner's work, visit our website.
Faulkner next describes Miss Emily, and the house's "heavily lightsome" decor corresponds to her physical appearance. Her skeleton is "small and spare" — "lightsome" — yet due to her short stature, "what would have been simple plumpness in another" — "heavily lightsome" — "was obesity in her." The woman and the house in which she spent her whole life are inextricably linked. Both are now deceased — she literally, the house symbolically — but they are regarded as visually similar even in death. She dies with "her grey head rested on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight" in a house "filled with dust and darkness."
The home, the pillow, and Miss Emily, all archaic relics of a time long ago, are described stylistically as "yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight."Faulkner needed a narrative approach that fluidly tied one scene to another because many of the short pieces juxtaposed former conditions with present situations and included leaping between different times. His idea was to have an object or action activate the identical thing in one scene or act in diverse backgrounds.
In "A Rose for Emily," for example, the new aldermen's attempt to collect Miss Emily's taxes inspires the narrator to recollect a scenario from 30 years earlier, when Miss Emily's neighbors complain about a stench emanating from her land and demand that the city fathers do something about it. "So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years ago regarding the scent," Faulkner says of Miss Emily's efforts in both scenes.
Faulkner's intricate sentence construction is his most prominent stylistic feature. The more complicated a sentence's structure is, the more psychologically complex a character's thoughts are.