The Vanishing South

William Faulkner(1897-1962， Nobel Prize’s winner for literature， isworldly known for his audaciously experimental style，unique narrative techniqueand other subject matters. In his Yoknapatawpha saga, he creates a legendarykingdom of which he is “the solo owner and proprietors”. He had written nineteennovels and many other short stories, which were unparallel in terms of range ofeffect, variety of characterization, philosophical weight, humor and tragic intensity,and especially originality of style.1942saw the publication of his novel Go Down,Moses. Its centerpiece, The Bear, his one master work, has acquired legendarystature in the literature history and attracted an amount of attention as it did fromthe very start. The story tends to see McCaslin’s growing up as the novel’s centralconsciousness, exploring man’s relationship to nature, and through the characters’destiny, social change of the South is also reflected.Although The Bear has grabbed critics’ enduring attention, relatively, a lot ofpapers have been published to explore the story from varied perspectives includingrace, Southern history and the hero’s maturity, etc. My paper, on the other hand,tends to explore the less-trodden road of Literary Stylistics, and apply Geoffrey N.Leech and Michael H. Short’s analytical method as theoretical framework toanalyze the story’s stylistic features, so that the aesthetic value and thematicmeaning of The Bear can be revealed through the investigation of linguistic featuresand stylistic effects.The thesis can be divided into six chapters. In Chapter One, Faulkner’s TheBear and literary review are stated concisely, and critical approaches and thepaper’s main ideas are briefly introduced. Chapter Two tries to explore The Bear’sstylistic features and thematic evaluation from the lexical level. Chapter Threetends to interpret The Bear’s stylistic features from the grammatical level, revealing Faulkner’s characteristics of his employment of long sentences and their functions.Chapter Four investigates stylistic features of The Bear from the level of narrativetechniques, demonstrating its connotative meanings. Chapter Five is the conclusion,in which we can see The Bear’s theme and artistic effects have an inalienablerelationship with its stylistic features.