Diction & Syntax

The novel is written in third person, but it switches off between looking into the thoughts of two different characters: Joshua Seigl and Alma Busch. This changes every few chapters, to allow the reader to hear the thoughts and learn more about the personalities of each character. Throughout these changes in perspective, I have noticed something Oates' has done stylistically to the sentence structures of the different viewpoints.
Alma's sections were definitely the most noticeable to me. Because she is uneducated, young, and simple-minded, her thoughts and conversations are much different than Seigl's. Those characteristics, combined with her strong emotions and opinions, cause Oates' to write Alma's thoughts as extremely long, run on sentences with simple grammar, a lot of profanity, and other harsh words. I'd like to share a couple example passages that particularly grabbed my attention.

"And Alma made sure he wasn't creeping up on her like he did sometimes (without him knowing she saw him in the corner of her eye) and she was prowling restless and hot Hate hate hate both of you Jew kike bastards and her heart pounding like she'd sniffed the purest coke straight up into her brain and she watched seeing her hand open a glass-front bookcase in Seigl's study and from a shelf she pulled a book that made her smile almost, small as a children's book, which was what she thought it might be, the title sounded like a children's fairy tale, Anna Livia Plurablelle, but when she opened it and tried to read the tiny print swam in her eyes, fucking words made no sense like they were not English or any kind of English she'd been taught and her heart kicked in resentment and fury and her hands yanked the covers of the little book back until she heard the fragile spine crack and she smiled with childish satisfaction like a boy yanking a frog's legs apart tearing the frog into two pieces. There! Fucker."
This passage is one big run on sentence with a few commas thrown in. There is a lot of bitterness and hatred, shown in her vile description of the frog, her evil satisfaction at destroying the book, and also all the profanity that is found in this passage of her thoughts.

"Seigl was moody a lot. Rude! On his good days he was respectful to her as he'd been in the beginning and often he gave her extra money and spoke of sending her to the local college but on the other days when his legs gave out or he couldn't concentrate on his work he sulked and hid away like a sick dog then called for her and expressed impatience she didn't get to him in ten seconds and he bossed her around as bad as her daddy ever bossed her mother and she heard that edge of exasperation in his Jew-voice familiar to the Tattooed Girl from other sons of bitches and the essential message was Look, he doesn't love you. Doesn't care a fuck about you."
That passage, again, contains a very long run on sentence with obvious lack of punctuation, which makes it more personal for Alma's character. Reading it allowed me to sense the bitter hatred she was feeling towards Seigl. These long, simple sentences with their profane language are prevalent throughout all of Alma's sections of the book, while Seigl's sections are more grammatically and politically correct, along with more intelligent. These distinct differences in the syntax and diction of the two characters allows me to better understand the characters, and also to have a clearer vision of which character is being observed and when.