Narrative Techniques: Voices and Thoughts
NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES. METHODS OF PRESENTATION OF THE VOICES AND THOUGHTS OF THE CHARACTER. THE POLYPHONY: It gives variety to the text, as the voice of the narrator alternates intermittently with the voices of the characters. then the text is said to become polyphonic, breaking the possible monotony of the narrator’s sole voice. the text is now richer with new voices that can offer stylistic variety in lexis, syntax, phonology dialect and register.
In order to present their voices, their actual speech, and their thoughts, narrative discourse provides the author of a literary work with another relevant device, called modes of presentation of speech and thought, consisting of the techniques used by the narrator in presenting the actual speech and thoughts of characters.
Indirect Speech
Indirect speech is a form of expression often used in written or spoken narrative works, as well as daily conversation, in which a comment is relayed indirectly by a speaker without quotation marks. The purpose is to provide dialog or other commentary by one person through the perspective of someone else.
The purpose of indirect discourse is to provide dialog or other commentary by one person through the perspective of someone else. Writers can use indirect discourse to provide information without a direct quotation, which also allows the writer to provide information about the person relaying a comment.
A simple example can be seen in a sentence like, “That man just croaked out that he was hungry.” This gives insight about the speaker in this statement, who is not the man that commented on being hungry.
Direct Speech
Direct speech is a method of writing used to represent the speech of characters or people by directly quoting their words. In general, a sentence with direct speech identifies the speaker and includes the spoken words in quotes. For example, the sentence, “The man said, ‘Tomorrow, I plan to go to the mall,'” directly quotes what the man said.
The use of direct speech tells the reader that the writer is not presenting an interpretation of someone’s speech but is, rather, presenting the exact words used by the speaker. It also distances the reader from the writer somewhat, as the reader gets to interpret the exact words of the speaker without feeling as though the writer is acting as a mediator between the character and the reader. These allow the reader to suspend disbelief somewhat in fictional works. Direct quotation is also quite common in nonfiction, as it helps to ensure that the writer does not accidentally misrepresent the speech or meaning of a real person. In many cases, direct speech is also used to represent characters’ thoughts.
Free Indirect Speech
Free indirect speech is a unique method of storytelling. It is a way of combining a first-person point of view with a third-person point of view, but removes such expressions that introduce a person. The narrator would usually voice out the thoughts and dialogue of a character without the usage of the usual dialogue indicators like quotation marks. The third person in free indirect speech is about referring to a character while still staying as a separate individual. As a separate individual, there is an intimate knowledge of what the character being referred to is feeling or thinking.
In one example “He went to the girl and thought that he lucked out. He is Random Guy, and he talks randomly to random girls.” In this case, the person who is describing the event and the characters is putting the thoughts and dialogue of the Random Guy into speech. In literary works, the novel “Emma,” which was written by the famous English novelist Jane Austen, is a good example of free indirect speech.
Writers, especially novelists, often like to use free indirect speech as a way to blur the line between the character and the thoughts and dialogue of the storyteller. One way to distinguish whether a writer has used this literary technique is to see if there are a lot of third-person singular words like “he” or “she” added to a sentence that describes a first-person point of view.
Submerged Speech
Submerged speech: shares a common feature with free indirect speech, viz., an attempt at narrativisation, which is absolute in submerged speech and relative in free indirect speech. Submerged speech is the most thrifty method of speech presentation as all the message that the characters actually utter is summarized in a few words.
Summarised Speech
Summarised speech: is another variety of narrativized speech. Several attempts have been made in this century to represent thought, and even to create human consciousness, in modern fictions, although similar e were also made in the past. This readiness to create human consciousness in fiction is in line with the scholarly initiatives carried out of all time aimed at gaining a better understanding of human nature.
Stream of Consciousness
The term of stream of consciousness is the label applied to the effect of a number of techniques used to represent human consciousness, especially the embryonic stage of thought characterized by chaotic and contradiction, called “interior monologue”. However, not all the techniques that are so named really deserve this term, unless we only mean “ inner awareness”. One of the characteristics shared by all the techniques of stream of consciousness is that the representation of thoughts does not follow the ordinary principles governing syntax. This absence of syntactic rigour, through the endless clustering of sentences and clauses, or their continuous branching is called anacoluthon. It is probably the result of the desire to reflect the flow of consciousness.
In this way, narrative discourse in this century has lost a great deal of its objective, realistic character and has become “ polyphonic”, as two simultaneous levels reveal themselves outwardly: the level of extrospection, or external reality, and the level of introspection, or internal reality.