Comprehensive stylistic analysis

Now, after you had learnt the intricacies of stylistic functioning of language units of different linguistic levels, we can try and analyze their convergence, which enhances and strengthens the given information and - still more important - creates the new, additional meaning of the message.

Starting on the road of stylistic analysis you should keep in mind at least three basic essentials:

1. Read the passage given for analysis to the end.

2. Be sure you understand not only its general content but every single word and construction, too.

3. Paying due respect to linguistic intuition which is an indispensable part of all linguistic work, be sure to look for the source of your "feeling of the text" in the material reality of the latter.

1. As various aids to recovery were removed from him and he began to speak more, it was observed that his relationship to language was unusual. He mouthed. Not only did he clench his fists with the effort of speaking, he squinted. It seemed that a word was an object, a material object, round and smooth sometimes, a golf-ball of a thing that he could just about manage to get through his mouth, though it deformed his face in the passage. Some words were jagged and these became awful passages of pain and struggle that made the other children laugh. Patience and silence seemed the greater part of his nature. Bit by bit he learnt to control the anguish of speaking until the golf-balls and jagged stones, the toads and jewels passed through his mouth with not much more than the normal effort. (W.G1.)

2. As the women unfolded the convolutions of their stories together he felt more and more like a kitten tangling up in a ball of wool it had never intended to unravel in the first place; or a sultan faced with not one but two Scheherezades, both intent on impacting a thousand stories into the single night. (An.C.)

3. "Is anything wrong?" asked the tall well-muscled manager with menacing inscrutability, arriving to ensure that nothing in his restaurant ever would go amiss. A second contender for the world karate championship glided noiselessly up alongside in formidable allegiance. (Js.H.)

4. As Prew listened the mobile face before him melted to a battle-blackened skull as though a flamethrower had passed over it, kissed it lightly, and moved on. The skull talked on to him about his health. (J.)

5. Scobie turned up James Street past the Secretariat. With its long balconies it has always reminded him of a hospital. For fifteen years he had watched the arrival of a succession of patients; periodically, at the end of eighteen months certain patients were sent home, yellow and nervy and others took their place - Colonial Secretaries, Secretaries of Agriculture, Treasurers and Directors of Public Works. He watched their temperature charts every one - the first outbreak of unreasonable temper, the drink too many, the sudden attack for principle after a year of acquiescence. The black clerks carried their bedside manner like doctors down the corridors; cheerful and respectful they put up with any insult. The patient was always right. (Gr.Gr.)

6. Her voice. It was as if he became a prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, sombre voice, a voice made for shouting about the tempest, her voice of a celestial fishwife. Musical as it strangely was, yet not a voice for singing with; it comprised discords, her scale contained twelve tones. Her voice, with its warped, homely, Cockney vowels and random aspirates. Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren's. (An.C.)

7. In a very few minutes an ambulance came, the team was told all the nothing that was known about the child and he was driven away, the ambulance bell ringing, unnecessarily. (W.G1.)

8. This area took Matty and absorbed him. He received pocket money. He slept in a long attic. He ate well. He wore a thick dark-grey suit and grey overalls. He carried things. He became the Boy. (W.G1.)

9. We have all seen those swinging gates which, when their swing is considerable, go to and fro without locking. When the swing has declined, however, the latch suddenly drops to its place, the gate is held and after a short rattle the motion is all over. We have to explain an effect something like that. When the two atoms meet, the repulsions of their electron shells usually cause them to recoil; but if the motion is small and the atoms spend a longer time in each other's neighbourhood, there is time for something to happen in the internal arrangements of both atoms, like the drop of the latch-gate into its socket, and the atoms are held. (W.Br.)

10. We marched on, fifteen miles a day, till we came to the maze of canals and streams which lead the Euphrates into the Babylonian cornfields. The bridges are built high for the floods of winter. Sometimes the ricefields spread their tassled lakes, off which the morning sun would glance to blind us. Then one noon, when the glare had shifted, we saw ahead the great black walls of Babylon, stretched on the low horizon against the heavy sky. Not that its walls were near; it was their height that let us see them. When at last we passed between the wheatfields yellowing for the second harvest, which fringed the moat, and stood below, it was like being under mountain cliffs. One could see the bricks and bitumen; yet it seemed impossible this could be the work of human hands. Seventy-five feet stand the walls of Babylon; more than thirty thick; and each side of the square they form measure fifteen miles. We saw no sign of the royal army; there was room for it all to encamp within, some twenty thousand foot and fifty thousand horse.

The walls have a hundred gates of solid bronze. We went in by the Royal Way, lined with banners and standards, with Magi holding fire-altars, ith trumpeters and praise-singers, with satraps and commanders. Further on was the army; the walls of Babylon enclose a whole countryside. All its parks can grow grain in case of siege; it is watered from the Euphrates. An impregnable city.

The King entered in his chariot. He made a fine figure, overtopping by half a head his charioteer, shining in white and purple. The Babylonians roared their acclamation, as he drove off with a tram of lords and satraps to show himself to the army. (M.R.)

11. You know, a lot of trouble has been caused by memoirs. Indiscreet revelations, that sort of thing. People who have been close as an oyster all their lives seem positively to relish causing trouble when they themselves will be comfortably dead. It gives them a kind of malicious glee. (Ch.)

12. "Call Elizabeth Cluppins," said Sergeant Buzfuz. The nearest usher called for Elizabeth Tuppins, another one, at a little distance of, demanded Elizabeth Jupkins; and a third rushed in a breathless state into Ring Street and screamed for Elizabeth Muffins till he was hoarse. (D.)

13. "You're the last person I wanted to see. The sight of you dries up all my plans and hopes. I wish I were back at war still, because it's easier to fight you than to live with you. War's a pleasure do you hear me? -War's a pleasure compared to what faces us now: trying to build up a peacetime with you in the middle of it."

"I'm not going to be a part of any peacetime of yours. I'm going a long way from here and make my own world that's fit for a man to live in. Where a man can be free, and have a chance, and do what he wants to do in his own way," Henry said.

"Henry, let's try again."

"Try what? Living here? Speaking polite down to all the old men like you? Standing like sheep at the street corner until - the red light turns to green? Being a good boy and a good sheep, like all the stinking ideas you get out of your books? Oh, no! I'll make a world, and I'll show you." (Th.W.)

14. I began to think how little I had saved, how long a time it took to save at all, how short a time I might have at my age to live, and how she would be left to the rough mercies of the world. (D.)

15. She was sitting down with the "Good Earth" in front of her. She put it aside the moment she made her decision, got up and went to the closet where perched on things that looked like huge wooden collar-buttons. She took two hats, tried on both of them, and went back to the closet and took out a third, which she kept on. Gloves, purse, cigarette extinguished, and she was ready to go. (J.O'H.)

16. "How long have you known him? What's he like?" "Since Christmas. He's from Seattle and he spent Christmas with friends of mine in Greenwich is how I happened to meet him. I sat next to him at dinner the night after Christmas, and he was the quiet type, 1 thought. He looked to be the quiet type. So I found out what he did and I began talking about gastroenterostomies and stuff and he just sat there and nodded all the time I was talking. You know, when I was going to be a nurse a year before last. Finally I said something to him. I asked him if by any chance he was listening to what 1 was saying, or bored, or what? "No, not bored," he said. "Just cockeyed." And he was. Cockeyed. It seems so long ago and so hard to believe we were ever strangers like that, but that's how I met him, or my first conversation with him. Actually he's very good. His family have loads of money from the lumber business and I've never seen anything like the way he spends money. But only when it doesn't interfere with his work at P. and S. He has a Packard that he keeps in Greenwich and hardly ever uses except when he comes to see me. He was a marvellous basket-ball player at Dartmouth and two weeks ago when he came up to our house he hadn't had a golf stick in his hands since last summer and he went out and shot an eighty-seven. He's very homely, but he has this dry sense of humor that at first you don't quite know whether he's even listening to you, but the things he says. Sometimes I think - oh, not really, but a stranger overhearing him might suggest sending him to an alienist." (J.O'H.)

17. My appointment with the Charters Electrical Company wasn't until afternoon, so I spent the morning wandering round the town. There was a lot of dirty snow and slush about, and the sky was grey and sagging with another load of the stuff, but the morning was fine enough for a walk. Gretley in daylight provided no surprise It was one of those English towns that seem to have been built simply to make money for people who don't even condescend to live in them. (P.)

18. This constant succession of glasses produced considerable effect upon Mr. Pickwick; his countenance beamed with the most sunny smiles, laughter played around his lips, and good-humoured merriment twinkled in his eyes. Yielding by degrees to the influence of the exciting liquid rendered more so by the heat, Mr. Pickwick expressed a strong desire to recollect a song which he had heard in his infancy, and the attempt proving abortive, sought to stimulate his memory with more glasses of punch, which appeared to have quite a contrary effect; for, from forgetting the words of the song, he began to forget how to articulate any words at all; and finally, after rising to his legs to address the company in an eloquent speech, he fell into the barrow, and fast asleep, simultaneously. (D.)

19. Mr. Topper turned from the tree and wormed himself into the automobile. And the observer, had he been endowed with cattish curiosity would have noted by the laborings of Topper's body that he had not long been familiar with the driving seat of an automobile. Once in, he relaxed, then, collecting his scattered members, arranged his feet and hands as Mark had patiently instructed him. (Th.S.)

20. It was a marvellous day in late August, and Wimsey's soul purred within him as he pushed the car along. The road from Kirkcudbright to Newton-Stuart is of a varied loveliness hard to surpass, and with the sky full of bright sun and rolling cloud-banks, hedges filled with flowers, a well-made road, a lively engine and a prospect of a good corpse at the end of it, Lord Peter's cup of happiness was full. He was a man who loved simple pleasures.

He passed through Gatehouse, waving a cheerful hand to the proprietor of Antworth Hotel, climbed up beneath the grim blackness of Cardoness Castle, drank in for the thousandth time the strange Japanese beauty of Mossyard Farm, set like a red jewel under its tufted trees on the blue sea's rim, and the Italian loveliness of Kirkdale, with its fringe of thin and twisted trees and the blue coast gleaming across the way. (D.S.)

21. The two transports had sneaked up from the South in the first graying flush of dawn, their cumbersome mass cutting smoothly through the water whose still greater mass bore them silently, themselves as gray as the dawn which camouflaged them. Now, in the fresh early morning of a lovely tropic day they lay quietly at anchor in the channel, nearer to the one island than to the other which was only a cloud on the horizon. To their crews, this was a routine mission and one they knew well: that of delivering fresh reinforcement troops. But to the men who comprised the cargo of infantry this trip was neither routine nor known and was composed of a mixture of dense anxiety and tense excitement. (J.)

22. I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods. For instance, there is a brown-stone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there v/ere prints of Roman rains freckled, brown with age. The single window looked out on the fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it was still a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be. (T.C.)

23. On the fateful morning of his fortieth birthday, in a room full of butterflies, the zamindar Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched over his sleeping wife, and felt his heart fill up to the bursting-point with love. He had awoken early for once, rising before dawn with a bad dream souring his mouth, his recurring dream of the end of the world, in which the catastrophe was invariably his fault. He had been reading Nietzsche the night before - "the pitiless end of that small, overextended species called Man" - and had fallen asleep with the book resting face downwards on his chest. Waking to the rustle of butterfly wings in the cool, shadowy bedroom, he was angry with himself for being so foolish in his choice of bedside reading matter. He was, however, wide awake now. Getting up quietly, he slipped his feet into chappals and strolled idly along the verandas of the great mansion, still in darkness on account of their lowered blinds, and the butterflies bobbed like courtiers at his back. In the far distance, someone was playing a flute. Mirza Saeed drew up the chick blinds and fastened their cords. The gardens were deep in mist, through which the butterfly clouds were swirling, one mist intersecting another. This remote region had always been renowned for its lepidoptera, for these miraculous squadrons that filled the air by day and night, butterflies with the gift of chameleons, whose wings changed colour as they settled on vermilion (lowers, ochre curtains, obsidian goblets or amber finger-rings. In the amindar's mansion, and also in the nearby village, the miracle of the butterflies had become so familiar as to seem mundane, but in fact they had only returned nineteen years ago, as the servant women would recall. They had been the familiar spirits, or so the legend ran, of a local saint, the holy woman known only as Bibiji, who had lived to the age of two hundred and forty-two and whose grave, until its location was forgotten, had the property of curing impotence and warts. Since the death of Bibiji one hundred and twenty years ago the butterflies had vanished into the same realm of the legendary as Bibiji herself, so that when they came back exactly one hundred and one years after their departure it looked, at first, like an omen of some imminent, wonderful thing. After Bibiji's death - it should quickly be said - the village had continued to prosper, the potato crops remained plentiful, but there had been a gap in many hearts, even though the villagers of the present had no memory of the time of the old saint. So the return of the butterflies lifted many spirits, but when the expected wonders failed to materialize the locals sank back, little by little, into the insufficiency of the day-today. The name of the zamindar's mansion, Peristan, may have had its origins in the magical creatures' fairy wings, and the village's name, Titlipur, certainly did. But names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit. The human inhabitants of Titlipur, and its butterfly hordes, moved amongst one another with a kind of mutual disdain. The villagers and the zamindar's family had long ago abandoned the attempt to exclude the butterflies from their homes, so that now whenever a trunk was opened, a batch of wings would fly out of it like Pandora's imps, changing colour as they rose; there were butterflies under the closed lids of the thunderboxes in the toilets of Peristan, and inside every wardrobe... (S.R.)

24. They were dusty and Rawlins was unshaven and they smelled of horses and sweat and woodsmoke. Some men sitting in chairs at the back of the store looked up when they entered and then went on talking.

They stood at the meatcase. The woman came from the counter and walked behind the case and took down an apron and pulled a chain that turned on the overhead lightbulb.

You do look like some kind of desperado, John Grady said.

You dont look like no choir director, said Rawlins.

The woman tied the apron behind her and turned to regard them above the white enameled top of the meatcase. What'll you boys have? she said.

They bought baloney and cheese and a loaf of bread and a jar of mayonnaise. They bought a box of crackers and a dozen tins of vienna sausage. They bought a dozen packets of koolaid and a slab end of bacon and some tins of beans and they bought a five pound bag of cornmeal and a bottle of hotsauce. The woman wrapped the meat and cheese separate and she wet a pencil with her tongue and totted up the purchases and then put everything together in a number four grocery bag.

Where you boys from? she said.

From up around San Angelo.

You all ride them horses down here?

Yes mam.

Well I'll declare, she said.

When they woke in the morning they were in plain view of a small adobe house. A woman had come out of the house and slung a pan of dishwater into the yard. She looked at them and went back in again. They'd hung their saddles over a fence to dry and while they were getting them a man came out and stood watching them. They saddled the horses and led them out to the road and mounted up and turned south.

Wonder what all they're doin back home? Rawlins said.

John Grady leaned and spat. Well, he said, probably they're havin the biggest time in the world. Probably struck oil. I'd say they're in town about now pickin out their new cars and all.

Shit, said Rawlins.

They rode.

You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins.

About what?

I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease.

Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways.

Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it?

What the hell's wrong with you?

I dont know. Nothin. I believe I'll sing.

He did. He sang: Will you miss me, will you miss me. Will you miss me when I'm gone

You know that Del Rio radio station? he said.

Yeah, I know it.

I've heard it told that at night you can take a fencewire in your teeth and pick it up. Dont even need a radio.

You believe that?

I dont know.

You ever tried it?

Yeah. One time.

They rode on. Rawlins sang. What the hell is a flowery boundary tree? he said.

You got me, cousin.

They passed under a high limestone bluff where a creek ran down and they crossed a broad gravel wash. Upstream were potholes from the recent rains where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows. One rose and flew, one stood. An hour later they crossed the Pecos River, putting the horses into the ford, the water swift and clear and partly salt running over the limestone bedrock and the horses studying the water before them and placing their feet with great care on the broad traprock plates and eyeing the shapes of trailing moss in the rips below the ford where they flared and twisted electric green in the morning light. Rawlins leaned from the saddle and wet his hand in the river and tasted it. It's gypwater, he said. (C.M.)

25. He leaned his elbows on the porch ledge and stood looking down through the screens at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below with the tiers of porches dark in the faces of the three-story concrete barracks fronting on the square. He was feeling a half-sheepish affection for his vantage point that he was leaving.

Below him under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun the quadrangle gasped defencelessly, like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze the thin midmorning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clanking of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather sling-straps, the shuffling beat of shoesoles, the hoarse expletive of irritated noncoms. (J.)

26. Around noon the last shivering wedding guest arrived at the farmhouse: then for all the miles around nothing moved on the gale-haunted moors - neither carriage, wagon, nor human figure. The road wound emptily over the low hills. The gray day turned still colder, and invisible clouds of air began to stir slowly in great icy swaths, as if signalling some convulsive change beyond the sky. From across the downs came the boom of surf against the island cliffs. Within an hour the sea wind rose to a steady moan, and then within the next hour rose still more to become a screaming ocean of air.

Ribbons of shouted laughter and music - wild waltzes and reels streamed thinly from the house, but all the wedding sounds were engulfed, drowned and then lost in the steady roar of the gale. Finally, at three o'clock, spits of snow became a steady swirl of white that obscured the landscape more thoroughly than any fog that had ever rolled in from the sea. (M.W.)

27. There was an area east of the Isle of Dogs in London which was an unusual mixture even for those surroundings. Among the walled-off rectangles of water, the warehouses, railway lines and travelling cranes, were two streets of mean houses with two pubs and two shops among them. The bulks of tramp steamers hung over the houses where there had been as many languages spoken as families that lived there. But just now not much was being said, for the whole area had been evacuated officially and even a ship that was hit and set on fire had few spectators near it. There was a kind of tent in the sky over London, which was composed of the faint white beams of searchlights, with barrage balloons dotted here and there. The barrage balloons were all that the searchlights discovered in the sky, and the bombs came down, it seemed, mysteriously out of emptiness. They fell round the great fire.

The men at the edge of the fire could only watch it burn, out of control. The drone of the bombers was dying away. The five-mile-high tent of chalky lights had disappeared, been struck all at once, but the light of the great fire was bright as ever, brighter perhaps. Now the pink aura of it had spread. Saffron and ochre turned to blood-colour. The shivering of the white heart of the fire had quickened beyond the capacity of the eye to analyse it into an outrageous glare. High above the glare and visible now for the first time between two pillars of lighted smoke was the steely and untouched round of the full moon - the lover's, hunter's, poet's moon; and now - an ancient and severe goddess credited with a new function and a new title - the bomber's moon. She was Artemis of the bombers, more pitiless than ever before. (W.G1.)