The Writing Style of Soyinka

Though maybe somewhat questionable at times in his portrayal of thoughts as a young child, I have so far thoroughly enjoyed Soyinka’s style of writing and overall depiction of childhood events. Thought not always necessarily entirely believable, he has, nevertheless, created a work of writing undeniably readable.

In order for such a work to be wholly factual, as some might hope for an autobiography to be, there would have to be provided nothing more than the thoughts of the writing at the moment in which each event occurs. For a novel, however, one might see that such a method of writing simply would not work. In writing a novel one would of course need to know and plan out in advance exactly which episodes of life should be written out, how each individual episode ties into the overall story, and the ultimate effect which the author would hope to leave the reader with at the conclusion of the work. So, at the writing of each individual portion the writer would of course be aware of all of the future occurrences as well as future inferences and deductions made of each occurrence and would need to plan out how to portray each occurrence in relation to each of the others, as well as in relation to the overall themes and message of the writing. As was mentioned in class, in order to complete this task Soyinka incorporated a great amount of delayed decoding- presenting the character’s initial confusion, but then illustrating the steps in which he made sense of it from there. If he had simply left it at the character’s confusion, though it might have been more accurate, would not have made it nearly as interesting or easily comprehensible for the reader.