The brothers Benjy, Quentin and Jason Compson from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury are among the most memorable characters in American literature. They are startlingly ‘real’ and at the same time works of art, constructed out of linguistic material. This article examines one of the tools that Faulkner uses to create the ‘realness’ of his characters: that of attributive style. Through the methods of psychostylistics, which combines the findings of narrative psychology and psychiatry with those of literary stylistics in general and mind style in particular, the wider implications for characterisation of differences in attributive style between the three brothers will be explored.
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