内容摘要
man himself lay in the bed‖ in the middle of two long paragraphs is very eye-catching. The information this sentence conveys is important enough to make the sentence a paragraph. This short sentence answers readers‘ guess about the secret of the house, and produces new suspense of the story. Readers could not help wondering who this man is; why he is lying here; who killed him. Therefore, readers will not delay to continue reading in order to get the answer. Although the author gives no obvious answers in the following sentences, the horrible atmosphere is well-developed. From here, we can notice that Faulkner‘s skillful syntactic techniques make his story very compact, interesting and meaningful.
3. Narrative Point of View
As to the narrative point of view, the author uses the first person plural form ―we‖ rather than the omniscient point of view to tell the story for the following reasons.
The first person plural form ―we‖ includes reader as one of them. This narrative method could shorten the distance between readers and the characters in the story, and the distance between readers and the author as well. Readers would have the feelings that they are invited to experience the whole story with other characters, and the author can communicate with them by using this narrative point of view.
―We‖ in the story refers to all of the citizens in the town. They represent the mainstream of the society. The narrator is the local people who actually experience the whole story and can narrate clearly and calmly enough from the outsiders‘ point of view. In the story, they not only convey the citizens‘ emotions, but also the author‘s. This kind of emotions is complicated and ambivalent. On the one hand, people yearn the past life of the Old South. They admire and respect Emily. For them, Emily is a monument which represents the Old South way of life. On the other hand, citizens disgust the downfall of the old tradition. Therefore, they have some conflicts with Emily, such as trying to persuade her to pay taxes, which is refused by Emily. The narrator as well as the local citizens witnesses the changes of
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