a rose for emily(17)

内容摘要

to persuade Emily to pay taxes, the repetition of ―I have on taxes in Jefferson‖ in a very short conversation gives readers a vivid portrait of an eccentric, stubborn, and prideful old lady.

2. Syntactic Structure

This story has many long sentences with complex structure, which is the writing style of Faulkner. At the very beginning of the novel, the author uses a long sentence to tell the death of Emily and others‘ responses to her death, establishing the severe tone of the story. In the sentence ―Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor——he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity‖, the author employs a 63-word-sentence to set up an oppressive atmosphere, which gives the reader the same feeling as Emily and the Old South tradition would give. These long complex sentences are also used to describe Emily‘s house such as ―It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street‖. The sentence gives readers a solemn feeling, just as the building style of the house, which may tell how the owners of the house used to be respected. Besides, this sentence is a periodic sentence, putting ―set on what had once been our most select street‖ at the end of the sentence in order to stress Emily family‘s glorious history. Such examples can also be seen in the sentence ―When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows——sort of tragic and serene‖. The author put the important conclusive information to the end in order to give readers certain time and room to imagine and judge by themselves towards Emily‘s change.

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