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interior monologue

When it's done well, interior monologue is one of the most elegant ways of establishing and developing character. The author climbs right into Sally's head or Estaban's or John's, and takes notes, giving the reader verbalised thoughts, perceptions, images, sensations, memories.

Often literary scholars talk about James Joyce and Ulysses (1922) when they talk about interior monologue, but you may remember that Ulysses is on my list of literary sacred cows, so I won't talk about it here except to say: Joyce doesn't deserve any special credit for developing interior monologue as a device. Tolstoy used it very effectively fifty years earlier in Anna Karenina (1877).

There are many examples out there of really badly done interior monologue, but I have been reading Cathleen Schine's The Love Letter (1995), and I keep running into good ones. So I thought I'd quote one of them to demonstrate what I mean.

"Helen [...] went back to thinking of the letter, for the anoymous, wayward love letter was, whatever she might tell herself, on her mind. It had become a nuisance overnight, a houseguest that would not leave, would never leave; but wouldn't come downstairs for breakfast either. The letter was a useless hanger-on. But it did hang on, distrubing her privacy. Go away, she thought. Get a job. Take a course at the New School."

Helen is a very complex character, one I can't quite like but can't dismiss, either, which says to me that Schine has managed to get this Helen of hers under my skin. She is frivolous in many ways and she's unapologetically selfish; she amuses herself by arranging the people in her life around herself like so many dolls. Once in a while she remembers that they aren't really dolls and improves her behavior, but it doesn't last. She gets away with this because she's charming; not many people see through her, and those who do seem to accept her for what she is. A lot of this is established through bits of interior monologue like this one, which works so well because of the associations she makes.

Helen has a talent for simply turning away from people who become too much work, but she can't get this anonymous letter and its mysterious author out of her head, and she resents it. What I like here is the comparison to a houseguest she can't get rid of and can't make do her bidding, either, because that is the way she lives her life, in a nutshell.

I haven't actually finished this novel yet, but I'll write more about it, when I do. In the meantime, I'll be on the lookout for more examples of well done interior monologue, here, and elsewhere.

May 29, 2004 03:58 PM

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