Style Analysis of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Hemmingway's "Soldier's Home"

Several noticeable similarities as well as stark differences exist between the style and structure of Ernest Hemmingway’s’ Soldier’s Home’ and William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily‘. A few of these include the arrangement of events, sentence length and the tone of the essay. Although detectably similar in minute ways, the two essays are overall more different than they are alike.

The most evident difference between Faulkner and Hemmingway’s short stories are the structure and length of their sentences. Faulkner employs extremely long sentences broken into two or three smaller hyphenated portions. Just the opposite, Hemmingway writes entirely in short, brief sentences, and in some cases, they last for only four or five syllables. As obvious as the sentence length, is the amount of information given. In ‘A Rose for Emily‘, Faulkner often gives more information than may be even necessary. For instance; “…the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant - a combined gardener and cook- had seen in at least ten years”. The trivial details are enclosed in the hyphenated section of the sentence. Hemmingway communicates in his sentences only what need be communicated and spares the frivolous specifics. In a few cases when Hemmingway does chose to proceed with extra information, it is given its own separate, short sentence, instead of being tossed into an already lengthy sentence like segments of a worm. In addition to the style of writing, the point of view in which the story is told also contributes to the list of differences between the two short stories. ‘A Rose for Emily’ is told in first person omniscient. Meaning, the story is written using first-person words such as ‘our’ or ‘we’ but is also aware of the thoughts and emotions of the people of the town that encompass ‘we’ and ‘our’. In contrast, the thoughts and