"There were Woody’s two sisters as well, unmarried, in their fifties, very Christian, very straight, still living with Mama in an entirely Christian bungalow. Woody, who took full responsibility for them all, occasionally had to put one of the girls (they had become sick girls) in a mental institution. Nothing severe. The sisters were wonderful women, both of them gorgeous once, but neither of the poor things was playing with a full deck. And all the factions had to be kept separate—Mama, the Christian convert; the fundamentalist sisters; Pop, who read the Yiddish paper as long as he could still see print; Halina, a good Catholic. Woody, the seminary forty years behind him, described himself as an agnostic. Pop had no more religion than you could find in the Yiddish paper, but he made Woody promise to bury him among Jews, and that was where he lay now, in the Hawaiian shirt Woody had bought for him at the tilers’ convention in Honolulu. Woody would allow no undertaker’s assistant to dress him but came to the parlor and buttoned the stiff into the shirt himself, and the old man went down looking like Ben-Gurion in a simple wooden coffin, sure to rot fast. That was how Woody wanted it all."
The most remarkable characteristic of Bellow's sentences (in the above paragraph and throughout the story) is his flair for making lists that don't necessarily feel like lists. Parallel to Lanham's notes, he is contributing to the asyndetic world, which is described as "a world where connections cannot be made." I find this definition curious in terms of Bellow's usage, if only because his listed items do seem to be connected despite the absence of conjunctions. Instead, his lack of "and" formats his list items in such a way where they don't stand completely alone, but they do exude a subtle vibe of isolation. In describing the two sisters, the tersely presented list serves as a method of simplifying the subject matter, making it seem matter-of-fact, casual, and quite common. Within his narrative, it seems like these details are expected and unsurprising to the reader.
Quite like with Lanham's explanation of Caesar's "I came; I saw; I conquered," Bellow is placing different essential character descriptions on the same syntactic level. Another representation of parataxis in this excerpt is his use of short phrases and clauses that embody very isolated, definitive thoughts. Like he says, these abrupt sentences feel emotionally charged and more potent in their ambiguity. For instance, "That was how Woody wanted it all" serves as a perfect understatement concluding a descriptive paragraph about a quirky situation. It also has a particular rhythmic value in sounding contrary to all that came immediately before it. This stylistic treatment works well with the story itself, which is an elaborate recollection of contradictory happenings and personalities.
"Bell-battered Woodrow’s soul was whirling this Sunday morning, indoors and out, to the past, back to his upper corner of the warehouse, laid out with such originality—the bells coming and going, metal on naked metal, until the bell circle expanded over the whole of steelmaking, oil-refining, power-producing mid-autumn South Chicago, and all its Croatians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Poles, and respectable blacks heading for their churches to hear Mass or to sing hymns."
Along the lines of Bellow's successful uses of form-follows-function, the listing in the above paragraph (or sentence, rather) has obvious musical qualities which reflect those of a bell's. The lone sentence functions as a single ring of a large bell, going back and forth, back and forth, over and over again, "coming and going, metal on naked metal," repeating similar word endings like "making," "refining," and "producing" all to create the kind of sentence that you can bop your head to. Its resonance is half charming and half excessive, and functions in Lanham's terms, as "a chorus-like ritualistic repetition combined with list-making," and further, that this kind of sentence has a "parallel construction"
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