Question

Read this paragraph from Joseph Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness. “The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway—a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.”
How does the structure of the underlined sentence differ from the other sentences in the paragraph, and what effect does the sentence’s structure have on the meaning of the paragraph?

A. It uses more descriptive, elaborate language, which sets the language style in the rest of the story.
B. It uses more action words, which sets the pace at which actions will unfold in the rest of the story.
C. It is more clipped, so that it is read in bursts of words, which creates a rhythm for the rest of the story.
D. It depends on punctuation to chunk the text into readable parts, which determines the speed of the rest of the story.

Answer 1

The sentence in question uses C. It is more clipped, so that it is read in bursts of words, which creates a rhythm for the rest of the story.

Explanation:

The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly.

This is the sentence in question which stands out from the rest of the passage with its insistent use of the punctuation in it and The descriptive language that is paced into small parts.

All of this becomes essential to the story of Heart of Darkness which is masterfully fragmented and reveals layer by layer of the journey in this descriptive precision that is on display in one of its opening lines