[Vocabulary] Can 'to puzzle' be intransitive?

[constantinusphilo]

Here is a sentence from a novel by Carson McCullers, The Members of the Wedding:

And then, on the last Friday of August, all this was changed:it was so sudden that Frankie puzzled the whole blank afternoon, and still she did not understand.

Is the use of 'puzzled' grammatical in this instance, or is it idiosyncratic?

 

[tedmc]

Yes, "puzzled" is used as a verb meaning "thought hard about something".

 

[5jj]

It does not sound particularly natural to me. We normally use intransitive puzzle with a preposition such as over.

 

[jutfrank]

Remember that this is creative writing, written by an expert user. It's neither ungrammatical nor idiosyncratic nor unnatural.

 

[5jj]

This native speaker did not find it very natural.

 

[emsr2d2]

I don't find it natural either. I stopped and reread the sentence when I first saw it in post 1, then I convinced myself that simply using "puzzled" to mean "thought hard and slightly confusedly" was perhaps just old-fashioned.
Certainly, today I would expect to see "Frankie puzzled over it" or similar.

Constantinusphilo, please tell us in what year that book was first published.

 

[GoesStation]

This native speaker did not find it very natural.

Me neither. I'd definitely put it in "idiosyncratic" territory.

 

[probus]

I'm in the same camp as jutfrank on this one. Unusual is not the same as unnatural to me.

 

[jutfrank]

What do we mean by 'unnatural', then?

I agree it's unusual to use puzzle intransitively, but I can't see how it's unnatural.

 

[constantinusphilo]

In 1946, and its author comes somewhere from the South of the US.

 

[5jj]

I agree it's unusual to use puzzle intransitively, but I can't see how it's unnatural.

Well, I thought it was probably not written by a native speaker. Is that clear enough?

 

[probus]

My daughter who lives in the American South has never heard this objectless intransitive use of puzzle, so I guess that either McCullers coined it or it has faded from use since 1946.