The Most Beautifully Wrought Symphony

William Faulkner (1897-1962) is generally acknowledged as an American literary giant in the 20th century. A major part of his contribution to the world literature lies in his outstanding experimentation with literary style. His masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, is acclaimed as "a whole textbook on the craft of fiction itself".The thesis, under the guidance of literary stylistics—a discipline connecting linguistics and literature, applies an innovative point of view to carry out the research, that is, aiming to explore how Faulkner uses stylistic techniques to distinguish the novel's four sections and conduct characterization, and meanwhile combine the four parts as an integrated whole. The thesis studies the novel's style from three aspects: lexis, syntax, and narrative techniques, holding that the lexical and syntactical characteristics help characterization and distinguish the four sections, while the narrative techniques connect the four parts together.Faulkner characterizes Benjy's mental deficiency by giving him a simple and limited vocabulary and simple sentences, Quentin's sentimentality and obsession with abstract thoughts with an abstract vocabulary, lexical repetition, and plenty of long sentences, and Jason's madness and resentment with oral lexis and the frequent use of comment clause "I say". In Dilsey's section, Faulkner uses many dialectal deviations in the direct speech to characterize a real Southern Negro, while for the narrative discourse he uses conventional syntax to make the language style in accordance with a third-person narrator's objectivity. On the level of narrative techniques, there are three major characteristics. A non-lineal structure maintains the story in suspense throughout the four sections. The multiple-points of view provide narrations revealing different aspects of the story, and the employment of unreliable narrator limits the authority of each narrator so that the readers have to piece together the plots and sections, and judge the validity of each narration to get to the true story. The stream of consciousness technique, deliberately making suspense and withholding information, is a precondition for the realization of the non-lineal structure, multiple points of view and unreliable narrator. By using these narrative techniques, the four sections are avoided to be isolated or mere repetition of each other; instead, they are combined into an organic whole.The research, aiming at a systematic exploration of the stylistic value of The Sound and the Fury, is important for better understanding and appreciation of the novel's artistic achievements.