William Styron is the author of the memoir Darkness Visible: a Memoir of Madness. Styron uses his syntax of lengthy sentences and very short sentences to provide the reader with an abundance of details, capture the reader’s attention, and effectively explain the severity of mental illness.
To start, Styron uses lengthy sentences to provide the reader with an abundance of details. For example, Styron writes, “It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated—the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer—had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering ‘depression’ as a descriptive…show more content… Styron describes a hotel in Paris: “In those days the hotel one of the many damp, plain hostelries made for tourists, chiefly American, of very modest means who, if they were like me—colliding nervously for the first time with the French and their droll kinks—would always remember how the exotic bidet, positioned solidly in the drab bedroom, along with the toilet far down the ill-lit hallway, virtually defined the chasm between Gallic and Anglo-Saxon cultures” (Styron 4). The length of the sentence provides a great deal of details all at once, which lets the reader understand more at one time, rather than receiving information through several…show more content… Unresolvable questions, perhaps” (Styron 79). Again, the contrast between the lengthy sentence asking several questions and the simple sentence provide an emphasis to the fact that all the things that the narrator questions are not able to be