Comparing and Contrasting the Writing Styles of Three Great Writers: WilliamFaulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Doris Lessing

A detailed Summary of Comparing and Contrasting the Writing Styles of Three Great Writers: WilliamFaulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Doris Lessing

An author's writing style is like a voice or a fingerprint: unique to that individual and impossible to replicate. There is no such thing as a "better" or a "worse" writing style, although it is possible to prefer one writing style over another, just as one might prefer blue eyes over brown, or soft melodious voices over rough, gravelly-sounding ones. Three great authors who illustrate the fact that there is indeed no such thing as one best or preferable writing style are the American writers William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the British writer Doris Lessing. I will compare and contrast those three writers' writing styles.

Many consider William Faulkner, as a writer, to be the best American stylist in the English language. He is, indeed, very good. Faulkner's style is often characterized by extremely long, detailed, compound-complex sentences that somehow still retain their clarity of meaning. An example of such a sentence occurs at the beginning of Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning:

The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he

smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked

shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic sha

mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish - this, the cheese

This is a masterful sentence that both describes the scene and introduces the theme and source of conflict for the main character, Sarty Snopes: "the pull of blood." Faulkner often uses long sentences like this at or near the beginnings of stories or novels, to both set the scene and to introduce an important theme.

between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear

labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his

An American writer with a very different style is F. Scott Fitzgerald. In his short story "Winter Dreams", for example, although he, like Faulkner, often uses long sentences, they are used most often to describe either atmospheres or individuals, rather than to both do one or the other of these, and then to also introduce a theme. For example, while Faulkner's second sentence in "Barn Burning" is the one quoted above, Fitzgerald's second sentence in winter dreams is shorter (although it, too, is a long sentence) and less ambitious, simply describing the main character and his actions: "In the fall when the days became crisp and gray, and the long Minnesota winter shut down like the white lid of a box, Dexter's skis moved over the snow that hid the fairways of the golf course" (p. 1094). Within this sentence, Fitzgerald also employs a simile "the long Minnesota winter shut down like the white lid of a box",

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Approximate Word count = 1003
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English