The Poisonwood Bible: Style 1 key example

This historical novel is highly informative: readers not only learn the relevant history of the time period and area, but also the way the Congolese people of small villages and suburban slums live. The reader learns about their language, crops, hunting methods, gender roles, childrearing methods, and religion, among many other things. The book also describes the natural environment of the Congo in great detail. Kingsolver communicates this wealth of information with metaphorical language and descriptive imagery. Her style helps her readers imagine a setting and lifestyle that most of them will never experience.

Kingsolver has a serious voice that ties together all the disparate narrators of the book. Her narrators sometimes address the reader directly with the second-person pronoun "you," but while it's not always clear who the "you" is meant to be, the reader eventually find outs that Orleanna, at least, is often addressing her dead daughter, Ruth May. Kingsolver often uses sentence fragments to emphasize dramatic moments. She also writes misspellings, misunderstandings, and childish beliefs into the novel, either to remind the reader when the narrators are children or to indicate when they are acting immaturely. Her use of Southern dialect and idiom demonstrate the distance between her narrators and their familiar home.

The many moving parts of the novel are split into seven "books." This is an allusion to the Bible, which is also split into books. Keep an eye out for explicit and implicit allusions to the Bible and Christian theology, as well as imagery that may tie back to Biblical stories. Some of these may be used ironically. Likewise, Kingsolver often references 20th-century American culture and products ironically, or to illustrate the differences between how Americans and Africans think and live.