These are long compound sentences, strings of main clauses coupled by conjunctions, running on and on into the night. As opposed to the segregating style, which favours small sentences in sequence, the freight-train is one long sentence made of many small main clauses linked with conjunctions or semicolons.
The Bible favours them:
And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear’; and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas; and God saw that it was good.
—’Genesis’
Not pure freight-train, admittedly, for new sentences start here and there, but most of them start with a conjunction ‘and’, which links the whole thing as though it were a single sentence. God likes freight-trains, apparently. Run-on sentences are, after all, litanies; they have a liturgical gait.
Marilynne Robinson starts her novel Gilead with this freight-train (including a subordinate clause ‘that I might be gone sometime’ early on):
I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said,To be with the Good Lord, and you said,Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said,You aren’t old, as if that settled it.
—Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Here, from Hemingway, a master of the craft, is a relatively short instance:
Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row.
—Ernest Hemingway, ‘Indian Camp’, In Our Time
It’s a style Cormac McCarthy’s readers will recognise well from his prose, too:
There were a few last warm days yet and in the afternoon sometimes he and his father would sit in the hotel room in the white wicker furniture with the window open and the thin crocheted curtains blowing into the room and they’d drink coffee and his father would pour a little whiskey in his own cup and sit sipping it and smoking and looking down at the street.
—Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Like the segregating style, the freight-train is insistent. It strikes only one note, but it flows. It is good for the same things and weak at the same things the segregating style is. It makes what it narrates run like a film in front of a reader. As well as action sequences, landscapes and journeys, the freight-train lends itself to descriptions of the activities of the subconscious, in particular dreams. It is a good vehicle for what is now called stream of consciousness.
Don’t try this kind of sentence at work; it’s not much good outside literary contexts. It’s not going to work for policy and business writing—too stylised for that. Nor is it particularly good for the exposition of ideas and the making of arguments. One thing
it is good for, though, is getting creative writing students writing, and keeping them writing, delving into self and subject, keeping minds and memories and fingers moving.
In character, though not in form, a simple sentence with a single subject performing many verbs reads very much like a freight-train:
He closed the bag and redid the fasteners and shoved it under the bed and rose and stood looking out the window at the stars over the rocky escarpment to the north of the town.
—Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
The old dog came out from its rug in the garage and wandered into the fenced yard and sniffed the boys’ pantslegs and sniffed the baby and licked its hot red tongue across the baby’s forehead, and then it scuttled up to the women on the porch and looked up at them, and looked all around and turned in a circle and lay down ...
—Kent Haruf, Plainsong
The linkage of independent clauses is called parataxis when it’s per- formed by a semicolon instead of a conjunction. Paratactic freight- trains run less fluently.
And now he knew that it was the waiting and that night he crept out; he had not heard them but he knew they were there and in the dark he could smell their fear too; he stood erect then, shouting at them in the darkness: ‘Yao. Come and take me. Why are you afraid?’ —William Faulkner, ‘The Bear’, Big Woods
Faulkner mixes parataxis with conventional compounds in that freight-train. Here’s some straightforward parataxis.
But for herself she had done nothing wrong; she had loved Septimus; she had been happy; she had had a beautiful home, and there her sister lived still, making hats.
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
He strained; he pushed; he looked; he saw Regent’s Park before him. —Mrs Dalloway
T RY T H I S
1 Write a run-on sentence starting with this clause: ‘I just want to go home’. Keep going for five minutes or at least two hundred words. Alternatively, take as your subject, ‘The thing I have to write’.
2 Write a journey you once took using the freight-train style. Again, two hundred words.
3 Identify the kinds of sentence Joan Didion uses in the opening of this paragraph from ‘The White Album’:
On this evening in 1968 they were gathered together in uneasy symbiosis to make their third album, and the studio was too cold and the lights were too bright and there were masses of wires and banks of the ominous blinking electronic circuitry with which musicians live so easily. There were three of the four Doors. There was a bass player borrowed from a band called Clear Light. There were the producer and the engineer and the road manager and a couple of girls and a Siberian husky named Nikki with one gray eye and one gold … There was everything and everybody The Doors needed to cut the rest of this third album except one thing, the fourth Door, the lead singer, Jim Morrison.
—Joan Didion, ‘The White Album’, The White Album