Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death. 

The author uses figurative language—words, phrases, and sentences that go beyond their literal meaning to add additional layers of interpretation—to craft the narrative. Williams’s syntax is complex and elliptical, and his diction is elevated and descriptive. These linguistic patterns describe the characters’ internal experiences and ways of seeing the world. Furthermore, Williams’s syntax and diction create a claustrophobic narrative atmosphere, which mirrors the sometimes-stifling predictability of life in Faha.

In Chapter 1, for example, the narrator describes Jack’s experience of Sunday Mass by saying,

In the parish, the doctor had the standing that close acquaintance with suffering bestowed. Beneath his waved grid of silver hair, his sunken eyes said that acquaintance came at a cost. […] Although he lived in the magnificent dilapidation of Avalon House, and carried himself in a manner that Faha might have summarized as Not like us, he was vouchsafed a place of honor in the parish (5). 

This ornate passage creates a heavy mood and thus captures Jack’s state of mind while sitting through church.