When a writer thinks of syntax as style, it's difficult to ignore the master of it, William Faulkner. He created new words, new expressions, forms of punctuation, and wrote one of the longest sentences in the modern novel. He was a master of syntax and manipulated words like no other writer then and since. From one novel to the next, he created new forms and styles. It's almost unbelievable to make comparisons between the forms of As I Lay Dying to those in Light in August, or to note any similarities in The Sound and the Fury where Faulkner, in his genius, told the story of Caddy Compson, through the voices of her three brothers (!), and used several styles at once, including stream of conscious, his syntax so in align to his overall designs that it's mesmerizing. And this is just language.
What William Faulkner did with narrative structure is another wonder. The Sound and the Fury has to be one of the most complex novels ever written. Faulkner begins his novel with Benjy, a thirty-three-year-old, nonverbal invalid, and the reader is inside Benjy's head where the entire novel is foreshadowed! While Faulkner is attempting all that, he is also searching for the meaning of an incommunicable experience.
Breathless just thinking about it.
One would think that was enough, but William Faulkner understands the human condition so well that his stories transcend their place and time. He knows the human heart. If you want to learn to write better, read William Faulkner.
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