Simple, With Attacks of Poetry
On the one hand, Faulkner's style is pretty straightforward. You get your good old subject-predicate stuff without too many pesky clauses to trip you up. Check out these examples: "Then Louvinia came in. She had already undressed" (2.1.38); "Brother Fortinbride wasn't a minister either" (4.2.2); "Ab Snopes lived back in the hills too" (5.1.12); and "She was already beaten" (6.2.19).
Short, sweet, and to the point.
But Faulkner's not going to let us pin him down that easily. No, every now and then he throws in a real zinger, some crazy, flowery poetry, that sounds like somebody else is talking. The sentences are suddenly long and full of metaphors and beautiful images—a total contrast to the direct style that most of the novel is written in.
For example, take this doozy:
[H]e sat… with that spurious forensic air of lawyers and the intolerant eyes which in the last two years had acquired that transparent film which the eyes of carnivorous animals have and from behind which they look at a world which no ruminant ever sees, perhaps dares to see, which I have seen before on the eyes of men who have killed too much, who have killed so much that they never again as long as they live will they ever be alone. (7.2.20)
Whoa dude. That's a single sentence, and we even cut some of it! What a crazy contrast to the short and snappy sentences we rattled off earlier. The difference between the flowery, clause-loaded sentences and the to-the-point ones might make us think about the huge differences between, for example, literature (or all of art, really) and the horrors of war. What other effects do these contrasts have on your reading experience?