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日本英語表現学会 紀要『英語表現研究』第 23 号 英文梗概
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English Usage and Style No.23 Synopsis
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An Aspect of Free Indirect Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories
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| Many stories Katherine Mansfield wrote after writing or rewriting "Prelude" in 1917 often use free indirect discourse (FID) as a predominant technique for rendering their characters' consciousness. One of the most important advantages of this technique is to "hide the very function of story-telling, to allow the story to tell and interpret itself." Mansfield succeeded in the removal of the narrators in several stories, but so much has been written about this so-called ideal of Flaubert's that there would appear little left to be said here. Therefore, my focus is concentrated on another function of FID: "a dual voice." The duality of narrator and character often produces a mixture of irony and sympathy, or of negation and approval. In this case, the main objective for which Mansfield uses FID is to express a character's excessive imagination, or oversensitivity, and more importantly, to turn subjective impressions of a character into a joke by contrasting them with the presence of an objective viewpoint. Such a comical mood in her stories is produced in an interaction between FID and objective narration. It may be said without much exaggeration that a humourous mood evoked by a shift in a viewpoint, derived from the subtle interplay between the narrator and the protagonist, is at the heart of Mansfield's mature works. |
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