Style
Willis includes elements of madcap comedy in the style and form of Passage, and links different events thematically in order to foreshadow later events.
The novel celebrates metaphor, the very idea of which gives Joanna the understanding of how the NDE works to help the dying brain, rather than to ease it into death.
Willis gives certain dialogue traits to some characters. Joanna, seeking to avoid leading questions, continuously asks of patients and even friends, "Can you describe it?" and "Can you be more specific?" (When she finds Dr. Wright starting to unconsciously mimic her, she grins in approval.) Maisie, meanwhile, always manipulating Joanna and others to remain with her during her boring bouts in hospital rooms, tends to begin questions with, "Did you know...?" as in, about the Hindenburg, "Did you know they had a piano? Up in a balloon?" Later, when Kit Brierly begins a question, "Did you know...?" Joanna laughs in appreciation.
Read more about this topic: Passage (2001 Novel)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes—countrysides and figures, movements and gestures—how could he have a style, that is originality?”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.... For me “style” is matter.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)