Abstract

This paper presents a stylistic analysis of Mohsin Hamid’s story “A Beheading”. This analysis is fundamentally based on Lexical and Morphological level of Stylistic analysis. This is a short story written in the first-person narrative showing the story of a middle-class man. The study aims to find out morphologically and lexically significant features from this text. Further, this Short Story is analyzed by classifying the lexical categories and mentioning the importance of their presence in this particular text. So this paper provides analysis of selected short story at two levels; morphological and lexical. These levels are explained by Paul Simpson in his book “Stylistics: A Resource book for students” in 2004. According to him, lexical level focuses on the lexeme, figurative language and literary devices, and the morphological level focuses on the morpheme, word origin and word formation. As a result of the application of Stylistic Analysis on this text, some lexical and morphological elements have been brought to foreground. Some literary devices like imagery, personification, metaphors, similes and repetitive phrases have been highlighted. Secondly, while working at morphological level different types of words belonging to diverse origins, languages and parts of speech have been found. This research is helpful to analyze the style of Mohsin Hamid and focuses on his use of diction. Thus this paper applies stylistic analysis on the selected short story and shows how one can better understand writer’s use of different literary devices and vocabulary items in a particular text. Through deep analysis of the text some words are found showing abuse of power and brutality, thus the writer has used expressive diction that contributes to the theme of terror.