Barn Burning and Soldier's Home are two short stories that offer and exceptional insight into the powerful world of writing styles. In the following essay these two short stories are discussed from the point of their unique language. To gather general information about the writing styles of Hemingway and Faulkner references were consulted. These references provided detailed features and examples of writing styles of the great authors mentioned above. William Meyer offered an intriguing analysis of Faulkner's language and its connection to Faulkner's southern background. Barn Burning, on the other hand, links Hemingway's simplistic style to author's obsessions and even introduces a model for a general "Hemingway character." After the discussion of these unique elements this composition illustrates few of the differences and similarities in Barn Burning and Soldier's House. .
William Meyer in his essay: Faulkner, Hemingway, et al.: The Emersonian Test of American Authorship, argues that it is impossible to be a great Southern writer and a great American writer simultaneously, because the very essence of America is a New World victorious hypervisuality and the essence of the South is an Old World aristocratic lyricism. He contends that authors like Emerson, Whitman, and Hemingway all conform to the American way that views truth or epistemology as visual, not verbal or vocal. Faulkner, on the other hand, sticks to his innate and obsessive Southern lyricism, promoting "aurality" over vision in such great novels as The Sound and The Fury and Light in August. However, he concludes that the genuine American mode of writing is essentially visual, and America will not finally depend on any Faulknerian rhetoric of fiction for its future, but on what Ralph Waldo Emerson has called our "tyrannous eye.".
A large section of the essay is devoted to description of Faulkner's lyric and aural language.