Stylistic Analysis of a Novel A stylistic analysis should address questions like these: 1. What is the discourse type? 2. What is the topic? 3. Who is it talking to/for whom and why? 4. How do the stylistic choices relate to these three questions? Here is a sample text:
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|2 |Alex La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird. (a) When the government trucks had gone, the dust they had left behind hung over the plain and smudged |
|3 |the blistering afternoon sun so that it appeared as a daub of white-hot metal through the moving haze. (b) The dust hung in the sky for some |
|4 |time before settling down on the white plain. (c) The plain was flat and featureless except for two roads bull-dozed from the ground, |
|5 |bisecting each other to lie like scars of a branded cross on the pocked and powdered skin of the earth. (d) In the distance a new water tank |
|6 |on metal stilts jutted like an iron glove clenched against the empty sky. (e) The dust settled slowly on the metal of the tank and on the |
|7 |surface of the brackish water it contained, laboriously pumped up from below the sand; on the rough cubist mounds of folded and piled tents |
|8 |dumped there by officialdom; on the sullen faces of the people who had been unloaded like the odds and ends of furniture they had been allowed|
|9 |to bring with them, powdering them grey and settling in the perspiring lines around mouths and in the eye sockets, settling on the unkempt and|
| |travel-creased clothes, so that they had the look of scarecrows left behind, abandoned in this place. (f) This was no land for ploughing and |
| |sowing; it was not even good enough to be buried in.