The Prologue closes as Elena begins to type in the middle of the night, is she typing out all four books at one go? We don’t know, but we know it’s impossible. But when I sit to type out a remembered conversation or encounter, of necessity I type quickly, perhaps writing run-on sentences as I go. As Christopher Warley writes, “Ferrante deploys the run-on to create a momentum that is headlong and occasionally breathless but still intimate—here you are, inside the operation of Elena’s head, everything she thinks coming out in the order it occurs to her….” But let’s be clear: Ferrante’s run-ons are clearly stylistic choices or, to be more precise, a style employed to build a cumulative effect with language, with structure, on a sentence level. This is something you can only do by writing purposely, by planning, by rereading and editing your own writing. The prologue, the impulse to sit down to write it all out, is a conceit that I was acutely aware of the first time I read the novel(s). No one can write even a tenth of that at one sitting.

Not only does Ferrante use the comma splice to create her run-ons, she uses semi-colons. Also, in lists, she does not use “and” before the last thing in the list: “…[I]t had become clear to her that her life would forever be Stefano, the grocery stores, the marriage of her brother and Pinuccia, the conversations with Pasquale and Carmen, the petty war with the Solaras” (161).

Here’s an example of Warley’s claim: “[Lila] admitted she had been sure she would be attractive to the males, she always was. Instead she immediately felt voiceless, graceless, deprived of movement, of beauty. She listed details: even when we were next to each other, people chose to speak only to me; they had brought me pastries, a drink, no one had done anything for her; Armando had shown me a family portrait, something from the seventeenth century, he had talked to me about it for a quarter of an hour; she had been treated as if she weren’t capable of understanding” (161).

Lenù is using information she gained from the notebooks (and, I wonder, is she here mimicking Lila’s style of notebook writing, its structure?). But, in the moment, she only knows that after the party Lila spitefully ridicules the evening, the people and the conversation, and even Lenù herself. Thus, from that night, begins Lenù’s “first break and a long separation from Lila” (163). And so Ferrante uses run-ons to signal a transition to a new period in Lenù’s life.

When I tutor I tell beginning writers who use run-ons that they shouldn’t use them because the professor will expect them not to; because they do not know they are writing them; because they have to learn how to structure sentences. But I almost always also say that we speak in run-on sentences, and in fiction and poetry you can do anything you want. The point is to use any construction, device, or strategy consciously as part of your style. Same with fragments, for example.

I use run-on sentences in my creative writing, but not only in my draft. I use them with purpose. I like that they plunge the reader forward and are, as Warley says, “breathless.” They’re good for interiority, which is one (of the many) frame(s) for the whole book. Run-ons don’t give the character time to pause and reflect; as Warley points out, Elena remains caught in the action, in the scene, by means of those sentences. Maybe I started using them from reading Ferrante years ago.