The paper demonstrates the relevance of linguistic analysis to literary text by identifying and describing the foregrounded pragmastylistic items in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. It also appraises the relevance of stylistic items to the context of language use in the text in order to bring to fore Chinua Achebe’s literary idiolect. Data for the study are drawn from ten purposively selected extracts in the novel based on the stylistic features and analysed for the purpose of explicating meaning communicated through the employment of lexical devices in the fictional world of the novel. The pragma-stylistic features that are analysed from the extracted portions of the text portray Achebe as a literary icon that employed those features to capture experience, represent characters and strike a balance view of different people’s experience.

Keywords: Pragmatics, Stylistics, Foregrounding, Language, Literature.