Rita Devyatova
Nov 2 · 1 min read

“An American Tragedy”: Some Little Notes on the Style

While I’m reading more and more, I notice that the author’s style is rather heavy, if I can put it this way: he draws on very long descriptions, complex sentences with more than four subordinate clauses, sometimes expressing very simple thoughts or facts in a very complex way. However, the stylistic devices which Dreiser uses are very imaginative and just beautiful.

For example, this metaphor made me feel like I myself was in some picturesque garden, lit by the soft rays of the rising sun:

“And in the orchard of a spring day later, between her fourteenth and eighteenth years when the early May sun was making pink lamps of every aged tree and the ground was pinky carpeted with the falling and odorous petals, she would stand and breath and sometimes laugh…”

Or, for instance, isn’t this combination of simile and personification just so accurate?

“The house itself, while primarily a charming example of that excellent taste which produced those delightful gabled homes which embellished the average New England town and street, had been by now reduced for want of paint, shingles and certain flags which had once made a winding walk from a road gate to the front door, that it presented a decidedly melancholy aspect to the world, as though it might be coughing and saying: “Well, things are none to satisfactory with me.”

An old dilapidated house is compared with an old man, who has long and eventful life behind his shoulders, but now can do nothing but cough and complain.

    Rita Devyatova

    Written by

    A LUNN student