We have already seen the free indirect style of narration, where a character’s distinctive voice gets infiltrates or gets adopted by the narrator. We get to read a character’s thoughts and anxieties without relinquishing the authority of the narrator. Another method of getting information from a character is stream of consciousness.
Stream of consciousness is when the readers get free access to a character’s thoughts, complete with free associations and half-baked ideas in a pre-verbal state. The most famous example of stream of consciousness in a novel is James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Introduction to Dialogue
The way a character’s speak can be very revealing. Their words and tone can hint at their emotional and mental states (drunk, high, happy, angry, shocked, etc.), their personality (dim-witted, charming, arrogant, kind, etc.) and reveal their education, social status, nationality, class, and even age.
The most common way readers experience dialogue is by each line of speech by a different character being given a new line on the page. The narrator might occasionally interject with “he said” or “she mumbled”, or the conversation may continue unimpeded. There are usually no doubt as to who is speaking and we readers get to feel like we are standing on the sidelines, witnessing a real conversation.
The lines of dialog are carefully arranged, and there are hardly any of those hesitations or chaotic words, the ums and ers that we get in real life. While some writers will offer hints as to how a line of dialog is said-i.e. “She whispered sarcastically,” “He shouted”-others would leave it to the reader to interpret the manner with which the sentences are said.
As well as disclosing some details about each character, what dialogue does is also give a novel variety. There is a opportunity for us to hear a number of various voices coming from multiple viewpoints and points of view, but each of them has room and time in the book.
This will inject bursts of energy and complexity into the story, really picking up the tempo, but at the same time offering an alternative to the authoritative voiceover effect that we are familiar with from a third-person narrator.
Introduction to Dialect
I’ve already bought up that how a character conducts themselves in conversation tells us a lot about them, like how in real life we tend to make assumptions about other people when we first heard them speak. If they struggle a lot with their thoughts, or get things wrong, we may think they ‘re anxious, lack trust, or just don’t know what they’re talking about. On the other hand, someone who can communicate respectfully and professionally nearly always leaves a positive impression.
But this topic of speech becomes especially important when we are faced with dialect-speaking or non-standard English characters. This can have many effects: it fills a book or a paragraph with an additional degree of realism: most people communicate with a sort of accent or inflection, but by putting it on the screen, the author is ensuring that their characters sound more realistic.
Dialects can give variety to a novel and allow characters to articulate and be themselves without a narrator to interpret or neutralize their words. Instead, we are placed into direct contact with a character’s subjectivity, not only are we given direct access to their thoughts but are also swayed to see things from their point of view.
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