Our Very Own Adventure by Carolyne Lee

Author:Carolyne Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522858686
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

CHAPTER 4

Like Listening to a Soliloquy:

The Narration of Monologues, Diaries and You-voice Stories

… this ‘I’ is the sort of character who would confess such things.

David Goldknopf1

The ‘you’ … is potentially more ambiguous in its functions than are the other pronouns … what linguists call ‘referential slither’.

Helmut Bonheim2

While the narrator-characters of experiencing and narrating I stories create in us a sense of being addressed by them, from inside the story, this is not the effect created by all I narrator-characters. The first-person narrators of stories rendered in the range of narrative perspectives of what I will loosely term the group of monologues tell their tales almost as an actor utters a soliloquy:3 as if ‘talking to [her or] himself or … regardless of any hearers present’.4 Sometimes the soliloquy is ostensibly addressed to another (usually silent) character in the story, or else the narrator pretends he or she is talking to no-one (although in such a case the narrators are by default talking to themselves). But, in the main, the narrator gives the impression that any ‘hearers’ are incidental: uttering the soliloquy, largely uninterrupted, is the primary consideration.

Of this type of story, the most common examples are the dramatic monologue and the interior monologue.5 These two terms describe highly specific narrative types that create their own singular effects. The dramatic monologue, although ostensibly addressed to a fictive ‘listener’ within the story, nevertheless gives the overwhelming impression—because of its nature as a ‘prolonged talk … by a single speaker’6—that the listener’s presence is almost beside the point, merely a device to trigger off the usually self-revelatory monologue.

Despite the ‘solo’ nature of soliloquising, paradoxically there is almost always a hearer or narratee of some sort, off in the ‘wings’, as it were, subtly (or sometimes overtly) inscribed in the text; for example, there is the figure of the fictive ‘addressee’ (in dramatic monologues), and the part of the narrator’s mind that can simultaneously function as the narrator’s own narratee (in interior monologues). These features may appear almost incidental to the delivery of the monologue, but they nevertheless shape it in subtle ways, and in turn alter the effect on readers and shape in specific ways the narratorial presence we can construct with which to experience the story. So the importance of a narratee’s presence and role should not be underestimated in terms of the total effect of a story—the case of Scheherezade and her narratee, the Caliph, being surely the best illustration of this. Gerald Prince, one of the first critics to draw attention to the narratee, sees this figure as one of:

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