Keywords

This is the term I came up with to describe situations where the narrator (I was thinking mainly of anonymous narrators) uses phrases like "perhaps," "probably," "might," "maybe" to weaken the certainty or authority of what's being narrated. Where, that is, the narrator hedges his bets. JW

Narrative/narrator uses a metaphor that dehumanizes a character. Popeye "had that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin," in Sanctuary.

Any time in a narrative where something happens, but the exact nature of the event is not revealed till some time later. Faulkner uses this technique quite often. The example here is from Monk, where Monk had apparently been living in a house for several months, but the town does not find out about it until months later.

This is for the occasions when Faulkner uses a series of dots as a feature of his prose - i.e. ". . ." or ". . . . . ." We can't call these dots ellipses, because they do not represent anything being left out of the text. The most disconcerting use of this technique is in "Miss Zilphia Gant." SR