William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Doris

¶ … William Faulkner, 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 shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish - this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. (p. 1137).

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.

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," which is characteristic of his style. Fitzgerald also has a very beautiful writing style, much more so than that of Faulkner, in my opinion. In this sentence, the words and phrases themselves seem to glide, like Dexter's skis over the Minnesota winter snow.