The Style Of Not Having One

I don’t have any style. Yeah, sorry. How can you have it? I can’t ask Santa to give me style for Christmas. I think I’d better ask Dante, Twain, Melville, Orwell, Hemingway, or even Flaubert how they got it. The question kept spinning in my head. I even dreamt about it.

In my dream he kept me telling, “Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work” (5). As I was about to finish the story as I read: “The beats of her heart grew fainter and fainter, and vaguer, like a fountain giving out, like an echo dying away;--and when she exhaled her last breath, she thought she saw in the half-opened heavens a gigantic parrot hovering above her head”. It happened to me that I had already grown fond of Felicite by the time these words reached my mind. I questioned how I came to know her so well if the narrator was in third person? I thought about Saul Bellow’s Seize The Day, where the narrator dives into the mind of the central character, hence making the reader see Wilhelm both from the inside and outside. In this case, my fondness to Felicite came from the insights I got to her thoughts through Flaubert’s narrator.

These words I had just read, for example, illustrate both Felicite’s inside and outside. Through careful description and metaphor, Flaubert takes the reader into her heart and mind. The reader feels what he is reading, the beats growing “fainter and fainter, and vaguer, like a fountain giving out, like an echo dying away”, making him understand both what we see of Felicite and what we feel about her. As well, both the narrator and author sympathize in the depiction of the stories central figure. The author exemplifies the character as being the leitmotif of the story by constantly evoking the story’s simplicity through the character. In other words, the story is of Felicite and Felicite is the story. A simple story. On the other hand, the narrator dives into her mind and makes the reader admire her simplicity in both thoughts and action.

It is basically the point of view of the story I was thinking about. The author, the narrator. I remembered the confusion present between these two figures while reading Slaughterhouse-Five. In A Simple Soul both figures coexist to describe, not explain. With the use of metaphors and careful description Falubert achieves this, while his narrator dives into her mind. Like here, I guess: “Her eyesight grew dim. She did not open the shutters after that. Many years passed. But the house did not sell or rent. Fearing that she would be put out, Felicite did not ask for repairs” (4). We get a glance to both her status quo and emotions, only described. Making it a quite simple story, since it only describes. But still, Flaubert’s powerful sentences and word choice make the reader disregard the story’s simplicity and instead enjoy it. His style is something…

I kept waking up tired to always dream about the text I’m reading in Pre Ap English class. Oh dear I already dreamt with Billy Pilgrim, Candide, genes, Macbeth, Oedipa Maas, and now Felicite? Give me a break. Anyways, I don’t have style I’m sorry. My bad luck was such that Tangen said next day in class, “Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work”. It made my rainy day.