ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE: A STYLISTIC READING

One way of analyzing a literary work is called stylistic analysis. This sort of analysis looks closely at how a writer chooses and arranges words. A stylistic analysis can focus on the author’s choice of words, grammar, or syntax (sentence structure). Usually a stylistic analysis will focus on one kind of stylistic choice (such as images) or, if on a variety of choices, on a fairly short excerpt from the work. Stylistic analysis always considers how the style contributes to the work’s theme or the overall meaning.

Images are words that evoke sensory impressions: touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing. Images provide a sense of the physical reality a character experiences in a story. In realistic fiction, images are not necessarily fore-grounded, that is, given a great deal of attention. Such images often serve more as background information, meant to be taken literally for their descriptive value. But in other genres, images take on the importance they have in poetry: that is, they sometimes act as symbols, with abstract or thematic meanings as well as a literal or descriptive meaning. The term “image cluster” is used when a writer builds in a number of references to a core image.

Bradbury uses images associated with fire and burning as well as images of light and running water, throughout Fahrenheit 451. The novel’s reliance on a specific pattern of images is discussed in detail by Donald Watt in “‘Fahrenheit 451’ as Symbolic Dystopia.” Watt provides a careful description and analysis of how these images are associated with important characters and events throughout the novel. Images used to describe events or characters make the novel a “symbolic dystopia” for Watt, with the stylistic choices Bradbury makes resulting in a subtle and distinctive dystopian novel. Watt shows how Bradbury’s use of fire imagery, with fire as both negative and positive, sets up two symbolic poles (196).

A stylistic reading can show how Bradbury brings together his three major image clusters in a short passage near the end of the novel. At this point in the story, Montag has escaped a Mechanical Hound by going into the river. Floating downstream, he is thinking about his life and the choices he has made. He previously planned to take violent action against the firemen, and has killed Captain Beatty. But after this passage, he decides not to destroy or burn anything else. Instead, he will try to preserve knowledge and life:

He saw the moon low in the sky now. The moon there, and the light of the moon caused by what? By the sun, of course. And what lights the sun? Its own fire. And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The sun and time and burning. Burning. The river bobbled him along gently. Burning. The sun and every clock on the earth. It all came together and became a single thing in his mind. After a long time of floating on the land and a short time of floating in the river he knew why he must never burn again in his life. (140–41)

This passage has 112 words, arranged in thirteen sentences, although six of those sentences are fragments (lacking either a subject or a verb). Little action takes place: Montag is floating, passively, in the river. He sees and, by the end, he knows. The river is what moves him (“bobbled him along gently”). Since the passage lacks action verbs or, in some sentences, any verbs, the nouns attract greater attention: there are twenty-eight noun phrases, including verbals, the -ing forms of verbs, which can function as nouns or modify nouns. (There are also two verbs, “lights” and “burns” which closely parallel similar nouns.) One-quarter of the words in this passage, then, are in noun phrases.

The nouns are mostly related to Bradbury’s image clusters: sun is used six times; fire and light are each used once. The verbal burning is used five times. Moon is used three times, and closely associated with the sun (its light comes from the sun), and sky is used once. River is used twice, and land and the earth once. The contrasting images of burning (of fires and of the sun) are brought together with the water of the river and the land. The moon, “low in the sky,” is nearly touching the land, and it connects the light of the sun with the earth and water. “It all” becomes “a single thing” to Montag. The other major image cluster is related to time: time occurs four times, day twice, and clock once. The passing of time is paralleled with the sun in two sentences: “The sun and time. The sun and time and burning.”

The images in this passage have all been used before, throughout the novel, to describe characters and events, and Montag’s perceptions of them. This view of the universe, in which the opposing or destructive forces meld with the nurturing or creative forces, is a vision that results in Montag’s decision to move away from destruction, even destruction for a “good cause,” and toward preservation. Described in a deceptively simple style, these perceptions lead him to a new consciousness and a final decision on how he should live his life from this point on. After he leaves the river, he shortly joins the underground resistance group and commits to joining their project of memory and preservation.

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