The interiorized discourse is not only an internal monologue itself, but also internal images, partially modeled through the character’s utterances, his/her emotional experiences, which find their realization in the structure of the text [3, p. 83]. For the current work, it is sufficient to point out that among the speech expressions of the internalized discourse, the following are distinguished: interior dialogue or monologue, free indirect speech and stream of consciousness [3, p. 83].
In the focus of our attention are two short stories by B.K. Hughes (she is famous for short stories and flash fiction; in the UK, she has won the Flash 500 Competition) – “Instinct” [5] and “Angel” [4]. After having analyzed the interior speech of the protagonists we can outline some different peculiarities of the author’s narrative strategies: in “Instinct” it is expressed graphically – with the help of italics, whereas, in “Angel” – mostly by interrogative sentences the protagonist asks herself, and sometimes we see the statements in italics, that is, similar to the handwritten style.
Because we are interested in the ways the interior speech is linquistically presented, in this paper we consider only the interior monologue. It is important to note that the present evidence relies on the fact that it is a complex form of a person’s one-sided speech interaction with herself/himself. The individual mainly fixes the final results of her/his own mental process, therefore “interior monologue is characterized by a certain meaningful integrity and continuity, which is ensured, in particular, by the unity of the topic” [1, p. 361].
From the short review above, key findings emerge: there are two types of interior monologue: direct – the 1st person interior narration and indirect – the 3rd person one, respectively. The author’s position is usually expressed in the indirect interior monologue, that is, the author’s speech, which is supposedly passed through the prism of the character’s consciousness. There is practically any author’s manifestation in the direct interior monologue. It is characterized by words and constructions of the conversational language style: “abbreviations, phonetic compressions, emotionally coloured vocabulary, short sentences, interrogative and exclamatory structures, repetitions, unfinished, illogical phrases” [2, p. 38-39].
It is important to highlight the fact that in both stories being analyzed, we have found examples of both direct and indirect interior monologues. The following is an illustration of the indirect interior monologue: “How can she admit that that morning she sang and danced around her flat, listening to the songs of her neighbour’s birds from across the interior courtyard of the building, and tending her begonias, which bloom with fanatical abandon? How has this come about, she often wonders – why is she able to have a kitchen full of delicacies to choose from, and no obligation to share her crème caramel or jamón, when other people can’t manage to scrape together so much as a sandwich?” [4, p. 13]. Here we observe the interior speech of the protagonist, Consuelo, an elderly woman who lives in one of the districts of a Spanish town. Her mental process is accompanied by certain external impressions and factors: her carefree life as she has never worked (“She never had a job beyond caring for her parents, but scenes of office life on television have convinced her she’s been better off far away from the workplace” [4, p. 12]; “Gazing around her at the fervent faces she can’t help feeling what luck it is that she’s free of the tyranny of fear” [4, p. 11]). Consuelo’s interior monologue is aimed at misunderstanding herself, the situation that has been developing around her, the circumstances she has not noticed for at least the last 20 years: she lives in abundance, while the rest barely survive. The character’s emotional interior speech is conveyed by means of emotionally coloured syntactic structures (two interrogative sentences, identical in structure and complicated by subordinate clauses), modal (can, be able to, admit, cone about, obligation, can’t manage) and evaluative vocabulary (scrape together, fanatical abandon, delicacies) as well as a lexical deictic marker (that morning) and indicative forms of verbs as the basic way of interior speaking.
The following text passage from “Instinct” is the example of the direct interior monologue: “If Edmund remains in his present state of mind, he might kill Wilde. And if he does, he’ll be executed. Edmund’s far too transparent to get away with anything. And how could I live then? She’d have to take action before Edmund did. But how? London-style social services didn’t exist in this place where people relied on family and community. And Colonial times might be over, but she feared that Wilde might benefit from a vestigial White Man’s Impunity” [5, p. 20]. Sally, the protagonist, is worried about her husband as he might kill Wilde and be imprisoned. She is sure that Edmund will do it, so she decides to take the case on her own. Sally’s emotionality, her immediate assessment of the situation is verbally reflected through the use of shortened verb forms, interrogative sentences, conditional mood, modal verbs (might, could), lexemes with evaluative meaning (transparent, feared, to take action), besides.
In future work, investigating the interior dialogue as the character’s reproduction of various semantic positions interacting with each other in a certain way might prove important.
References:
1. Лещишин З. Внутрішній монолог: до питання дефініції. URL: http://www.inst-ukr.lviv.ua/files/paradygma/360-366-lz.pdf (дата звернення: 07.02.2023).
2. Матковська Г. О. Типологія композиційно-мовленнєвих форм, які фіксують внутрішнє мовлення. URL: https://core.ac.uk/download/47223756.pdf (дата звернення: 06.03.2023).
3. Найдюк О. В., Приходько В. Б. Особливості інтеріорізованого дискурсу. Нова філологія. 2020. Вип. 79. С. 83–88. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26661/2414-1135/2020-79-14.
4. Hughes B. K. Angel. URL: https://storgy.com/2021/06/16/the-angel-by-barbara-kuessner-hughes/ (дата звернення: 09.09.2022).
5. Hughes B. K. Instinct. URL: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Inst1238.shtml (дата звернення: 15.09.2022).
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