Sentence Complexity in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

Abstract

Literary stylistics is a branch of applied linguistics that examines the beauty of language used by authors. It investigates the various language features systematically. It also determines the role of linguistics in making any literary interpretation. The present study aims at showing the importance of using complex sentences as a stylistic feature in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. It attempts to analyze sentence complexity in the target novel. In order to achieve this purpose, the current study uses stylistics as an approach. It also builds upon Halliday’s and Matthiessen’s Functional Grammar (4102). By means of complex sentences, Faulkner makes his characters’ traits different and unique. The results show that simple language and simple sentences in the first section (Benjamin’s section) make readers feel as if they were reading a story written by a child because of the mental disorder of Benjamin. Furthermore, the complex sentences and the stylistically rich language in Quentin’s section give the reader the impression that the narrator, Quentin, is intelligent, literate and well-educated. In the third section, the colloquial language gives the reader the impression that the narrator, Jason, is an illiterate and close-minded person.