Modern Language Quarterly

MODES OF INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

A FORMAL DEFINITION
By DEREK
BICKERTON

Every novelist who tries to present character in depth faces the prob-
lem of conveying, in a convincing way, events in his characters’ inner
lives which, if they occurred in a real-life situation, would remain for-
ever beyond the knowledge of an outside observer. It is no easy prob-
lem. Paul Valbry grew disgusted with fiction because of the arbitrari-
ness of such statements as “the Marquise arrived at nine”; many less
sensitive writers must have felt guilt pangs of spurious omniscience at
having to write “the Marquise felt a tremor of anticipation” or “the
Marquise thought the room was vulgarly decorated.” Yet the thing
must be done somehow, if the novel is to be more than a mere chronicle
of facts and acts.
Perhaps because of this awkwardness, several distinct methods of
rendering interior monologue have been employed by different writers
at different times. Robert Humphrey lists these as soliloquy, omnis-
cient description, indirect interior monologue, and direct interior
mono1ogue.l In soliloquy, the material is presented in the character’s
own words, but in a logical and connected manner; in omniscient
description, it is reported from an outside, godlike point of view; in
indirect interior monologue, it is still reported, but from the charac-
ter’s own viewpoint; in direct interior monologue, the first person is
employed as in soliloquy, but instead of being logically arranged, the
mental events are presented “just as these processes exist at various
lStream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel, Perspectives in Criticism, No. 3
(Berkeley and Los Angela, 1954), p. 23.
229

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230 INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

levels of conscious control before they are formulated for deliberate

speech” (p. 24).
These definitions are helpful, and they might seem adequate, were
it not for the vague and often conflicting remarks critics have made on
the subject. Confusion is most apparent, as might be expected, when
the newest of the four methods-direct interior monologue or stream
of consciousness-is under discussion. Harry Levin hails Shakespeare,
Fanny Burney, Fenimore Cooper, Dickens, and Melville as precursors
of the method,2 but Leon Edel dismisses from parenthood a Dostoev-
skian monologue on the odd ground that it is “merely unspoken
~ p e e c h . ”Robert
~ S. Ryf, in listing the method’s characteristics, names
ihree main features, of which the first-internal orientation-could
apply equally well to indirect interior monologue, and the third-
immediate presentation in the first person-to soliloquy.* Marvin Mag-
alaner describes as “modification of the stream of consciousness” the
technique of an early Joyce story-“Eveline”-which in fact blends
indirect interior monologue with omniscient description.6 Some critics
are even candid enough to admit their own uncertainty. Stephen
Spender, for example, writes: “The interior monologue is not-as I
once myself thought-a super-real device for expressing how streams of
thinking actually go through people’s heads. It is the conductor
through which the external world passes in order to realize itself as
interior world. . . .”6 While admiring Spender’s honesty, one cannot see
that this helps much.
T h e cause of this confusion lies in the fact that all the critics men-
tioned-and many others-have attempted conceptual rather than for-
mal definitions. They have considered techniques of presentation as
variations in the author’s viewpoint rather than as varying selections
’James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (New York, 1960), pp. 91-93. Among the
numerous ancestors claimed by other critics are Poe, Browning, and Dostoevski (Andre?
Gide, lectures on Dostoevski, 1922, quoted by Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [New York,
19591, p. 534 n,), Maria Edgeworth, Richardson, and Smollett (Walter Allen, T h e
English Novel [London, 19541, p. 339, and Sterne and Henry James (Edward Wagen-
knecht, Cavalcade of the English Novel [New York, 19541, p. 507)-a clear case of “Here
Comes Everybody.”
a T h e Psychological Novel, 1900-I950 (London, 1955), p. 16. I shall return to this subject
of “speech” in a subsequent paragraph.
‘ A New Approach to Joyce, Perspectives in Criticism, No. 8 (Berkeley and Los Angela,
1962), p. 95.
Time of Apprenticeship (New York, 1959), pp. 123-24.
T h e Struggle of the Modern London, 1963), p. 141. Some, though by no means all,
b
ol the uncertainties about this su ject are caused by treating the terms “direct interior
monologue” and “stream ol consciousness” as if they were interchangeable. This point is
dealt with by Humphrey and Edel in the works cited. I t would help if their recommenda-
tions-to use the first term to describe the technique, the second to describe that which
is expressed by it-were generally adopted.

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DEREK BICKERTON 231

of language. This is perhaps inevitable in an age in which the writer

II_

has had the role of shaman thrust upon him, and an anguished search
for his particular “revelation” has largely replaced study of the mechan-
ics of his craft. The danger is that such approaches may lead us to
mistake the true nature of fiction, as I think one critic does when he
writes, “the stream of consciousness writer. . . searches for the fullest
accuracy, the closest possible approach to a~tuality.”~ This is the nat-
uralist fallacy all over again. It assumes that fiction and life differ in
degree, not kind, that an approximation of one to the other is possible,
whereas fiction is merely a selection and arrangement of language de-
signed to produce an illusion of reality, and its success or failure at
this can be measured on no set scale, but must vary in accordance with
a number of other variable factors-the presuppositions of the age,
current standards of taste and criticism, and the reader’s own knowl-
edge, predilections, and state of mind, to mention only a few.
If literature is, first and foremost, “words on a page,” it may be more
profitable to attempt purely formal definitions of the four modes. It is
fashionable nowadays to sneer at IEdouard Dujardin; yet he still has
greater claims than any other contestant to be considered the originator
of direct interior monologue, and he showed himself more perceptive
than most of his later commentators when he declared that it gives

that unheard and unspoken speech by which a character expresses

his inmost thoughts (those lying nearest the unconscious) without
regard to logical organization-that is, in their original state-
by means of direct sentences reduced to the syntactic minimum,
and in such a way as to give the impression of reproducing the
thoughts just as they come into the mind.8

He has clearly grasped that the method is a literary convention, not

some wondrous new psychological device; moreover, a1though the mod-
Crn linguistician may smile at the naivett of “direct sentences” and
“syntactic minimum,” Dujardin has shown awareness of its connections
with speech and syntax. Yet Levin dismisses his definition as “ram-
bling.” Edel objects to having the word “speech” introduced “in allud-
ing to something ‘unheard and unspoken’ ”; he claims that it “implies
that we think always on the verbal level” (p. 54).
The question whether thought is possible without speech is one that
John McCormick, Catustrophe and Imagination (London, 1957), p. 61.
Quoted by Levin, p. 90, and Edel, p. 54 (my italics).

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232 INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

has much exercised philosophers and psychologists as well as students of

language. Perhaps the most sensible contribution to the controversy is
still that of Edward Sapir:

What if language is not so much a garment as a prepared road or

groove? It is indeed in the highest degree likely that language
is an instrument originally put to uses lower than the conceptual
plane, and that thought arises as a refined interpretation of its
content. The product grows, in other words, with the instrument.
.. . Thought may be a natural domain apart from the artificial one
of speech, but speech would seem to be the only road we know of
that leads to it.9

In other words, even if the writer were really engaged in the photog-
raphy of thought, he could only develop his snapshots in terms of
speech, and Dujardin’s terminology would still be justified. In fact,
what he is producing is a conventionalized artifact which will give the
illusion of thought, and speech forms the raw material of this artifact,
just as stone does of a statue or paint of a portrait. With both conveni-
ence and propriety, therefore, we may describe that which monologue
renders as “inner speech,”1° and compare the methods of presenting it
with the methods used to present ordinary speech.
It has been generally assumed by orthodox grammarians that there
are only two ways of doing this. Even Otto Jespersen, who recognized
that an interrogative clause may keep the inverted order of direct
questions while shifting person and tense, stated confidently that “when
one wishes to report what someone else says or has said.. . two ways
are open to one. Either one gives, or purports to give, the exact
words: direct speech. . . or else one adapts the words according to the
circumstances in which they are now quoted: indirect speech.” Ad-
mittedly, he goes on to mention a third form, ‘‘‘tyle indirect libre,”
or “erlebte rede”-the use of foreign terms is significant-but he re-
gards this as merely a subclass of indirect speech (“reported” as op-
posed to “dependent”), the only difference being that the former sup-

Language (London, 1949), pp. 15-16.

1OThe term is used by Stephen Ullmann, StyZe in the French Novel (Cambridge,
Eng., 1957), p. 110, and John Spencer, “A Note on the ‘Steady Monologu of the Inte-
riors,”’ REL, VI, No. 2 (April, 1965), p. 37 n. The present paper is deepry indebted to
their work-and to that of others such as Michael Gregory and Randolph Quirk-in the
comparatively new field of English studies known by the somewhat cumbersome title of
“linguistic stylistics.”

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DEREK BICKERTON 233

presses reporting phrases, i.e., “he said that.”ll H. Poutsma describes

this third form as intemdiate between direct and indirect speech; he
gives numerous examples from nineteenthcentury English fiction, but
fails to draw any general conclusions from them.12
They order these things better in France. As early as 1912, Charles
Bally pointed out the existence of free indirect speech as a distinct
medium,lB and a perceptive critic of French literature, Stephen U11-
mann, granting that free indirect shares with direct speech the same
tense and pronoun changes, notes:
In other respects, however, it is closer to the syntax of direct
reporting. There is no subordination: in free indirect speech, each
..
sentence is an independent unit.. [Ii-preserves] various emotive
elements which have to be sacrificed in indirect reporting: ques-
.
tions, exclamations, interjections; adverbs.. which give the ut-
terance a subjective colouring; colloquial, vulgar and slang terms
which are expressive of the speaker’s character and attitude. (p. 97)

L. C. Harmer has detected still a fourth category. Quoting from Sar-

tre’s La Mort duns Z‘&me-“Il se retourna brusquement: quelqu’un a
cognC B la vitre”-he points out that this differs both from the direct
speech version, which would be “Quelqu’un a cognC B la vitre, se dit-
il,” and from the sentence as it would be in either of the indirect
forms: “Quelqu’un avait cogn6 A la vitre.” He concludes that “the
practice of interpolating direct speech into the narrative. . .might well
be called the ‘style direct libre.’ ”14
Wenow have four methods of rendering inner speech and four for-
mal categories of speech presentation. The question arises whether this
is mere coincidence, or whether, in fact, methods and categories cor-
respond.16 The only way to determine this is to take passages typical of
Humphrey’s four methods and submit them to analysis.
Novels as diverse as Fielding’s Jonathan Wild and Stendhal’s Le

“Modern English Grummar (London, 1961), IV, 151. T h e usual translation of

“erlebte rede”-interior monologue-helps further to bedevil the subject.
UGrumrnar of Late Modern English (Groningen, 1929), Part I, Vol. 2, pp. 630-32.
=“Le Style indirect libre en franpis modeme,” GRM, IV (1919, 549-56, 597-606.
A fuller account of the subject appears in Marguerite Lips, Le Style indirect libre
(Paris, 1926).
l4 T h e French Language Today (Melbourne, 1954), p. 301.
mDickens’use of the four categories to report spoken speech is skillfully analyzed b
Michael Gregory, “Old Bailey Speech in A Tale of Two Cities,” REL, VI, No. 2 (April
1965), pp. 42-55. Gregory also includes useful definitions of the two newest (or most
recently discovered) categories which develop and amplify those of Ullmann and Harmer.

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 Modern Language Quarterly

234 INTERIOK MONOLOGUE

Rouge et Ze noir make extensive use of the soliloquy, generally as “a

non-structural aside which has to be despatched artistically with as l&&e
pain as possib1e.”l6 A typical example occurs in Scott’s Fortunes of
Nigel:

Thus communed, or thus might have communed, the Lord of

Glenvarloch with his own mind.
“She is right, and has taught me a lesson I will profit by. I
have been, through my whole life, one who leant upon others
for that assistance, which it is more truly noble to derive from my
own exertions. I am ashamed of feeling the paltry inconvenience
which long habit had led me to annex to the want of a servant’s
assistance-I am ashamed of that; but far, far more am I ashamed
to have suffered the same habit of throwing my burden on others,
to render me, since I came to this city, a mere victim of those
events, which I have never even attempted to influence-a thing
never acting, but perpetually acted upon-protected by one friend,
deceived by another; but in the advantage which I received from
the one, and the evil I have sustained from the other, as passive
and helpless as a boat that drifts without oar or rudder at the mercy
of the winds and waves.”l’

First-person verbs and a basic present tense are used throughout; the
passage, like almost all of its type, is enclosed in inverted commas;18
there is even the introductory reporting clause-“communed . . . the
Lord of Glenvar1och”-corresponding to the “he said” or equivalent
that normally introduces “spoken” direct speech. However-and this
is true of the vast majority of soliloquies-it represents a type of direct
speech very far from colloquial dialogue and very close to the rhetoric
of the kind of oration that is carefully written out beforehand. (The
model was perhaps Burke.) Sentence-length, syntax, and diction are
those of the written rather than the spoken language. T h e third sen-
tence, a 125-word monster of almost Faulknerian complexity, contains
the devices of rhetorical repetition (“I am ashamed” three times, in-
verted once for variety); antithesis, arranged in ascending scale to
form climax (“never acting. . . perpetually acted upon,” “protected by
one friend, deceived by another,” “the advantage which I received
lo Melvin Friedman, Stream of Consciousness (London, 1955), pp. 217-18.
London, 1901, pp. 388-89.
l e T h e only exceptions I have so far discovered are both by Joyce (Stephen Hero
[London, 19441, p. 169, and A Portrait of the Artist m n Young M a n , Jonathan Cape Illus-
trated ed. [London, 19561, p. 95). But Joyce’s hatrcd of the inverted comma is notorioas.

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DEREK BICKERTON 235

from the one.. . the evil I have sustained from the other”); and bal-
anced pairs of adjectives and nouns, also arranged as a triplet (‘‘passive
and helpless,” “oar or rudder,” “winds and waves”). If the soliloquy
had abandoned such elaborations and adopted instead the turns of
colloquial speech, it might have enjoyed a longer life as a method of
inner-speech presentation; but its stiltedness and the fact that, as a
borrowed stage convention, it is basically antifictional combined to
make it virtually extinct by the beginning of the twentieth century.
For an example of omniscient description, we will take a passage
from George Eliot’s Middlemarch:
Lydgate believed himself to be careless about his dress, and he
despised a man who calculated the effects of his costume; it seemed
to him only a matter of course that he had abundance of fresh
garments-such things were naturally ordered in sheaves. It must
be remembered that he had never hitherto felt the check of im-
portunate debt, and he walked by habit, not by self-criticism.
But the check had come.
Its novelty made it the more irritating. He was amazed, dis-
gusted that conditions so foreign to all his pu’poses, so hatefully
disconnected with the objects he cared to occupy himself with,
should have lain in ambush and clutched him when he was un-
aware. And there was not only the actual debt; there was the cer-
tainty that in his present position he must go on deepening it.19

Here, while s y n t a x and diction are in some respects closer to the

spoken language than those of the previous extract, the author’s is the
only voice we hear. All the features of orthodox indirect speech are
present: past-tense verbs, third-person pronouns, subordination to re-
porting clauses (“it seemed to him.. . that,” “He was amazed, dis-
gusted that”). The method has the advantage of enabling the author
to incorporate background and narrative material in the monologue,
thus preventing the latter from becoming a “non-structural aside”
while avoiding the sense of artificiality that would arise if the character
himself imparted such information. But there is a certain lack of im-
mediacy-the inner speech is summarized, rather than rendered di-
rect-and pains have to be taken to avoid the monotony of repeated
“he thought/felt that” constructions. A common device is to imper-
sonalize the reporting clause (“It must be remembered that,” “there
1, London, 1950, pp. 560-61.

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236 INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

was the certainty that”). I t is surprising how rarely this method is sus-
tained through long passages, without the intermission of sentences
purely narrative or descriptive, or the excision of the reporting cIause?O
A passage from D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love provides an ex-
ample of the third method, indirect monologue reported from the
character’s point of view:

Gerald! Could he fold her in his arms and sheathe her in sleep?
Ha! He needed putting to sleep himself-poor Gerald. That
was all he needed. What did he do, he made the burden for her
greater, the burden of her sleep was the more intolerable, when he
was there. He was an added weariness upon her unripening nights,
her unfruitful slumbers. Perhaps he got some repose from her.
Perhaps he did. Perhaps this was what he was always dogging her
for, like a child that is famished, crying for the breast. Perhaps
this was the secret of his passion, his forever unquenched desire
for her-that he needed her to put him to sleep, to give him
repose.
What then! Was she his mother? Had she asked for a child,
whom she must nurse through the nights, for her lover? She des-
pised him, she despised him, she hardened her heart. An infant
crying in the night, this Don Juan.21

While the third-person, past-tense sequence is maintained through-

out, there is a complete absence of subordination. T h e “questions,
exclamations, interjections” which Ullmann noted as features of free in-
direct speech are there in abundance, retaining their direct-speech
form and word-order, and so is the colloquial phrasing (“needed
putting to sleep,” “Perhaps he did,” “dogging her for”). Yet in its way
this passage is as rhetorical, as “written,” as the Scott soliloquy. Its fre-
quent repetitions on both lexical and syntactical levels are those of
artifice rather than colloquial circumlocution-although the writer’s
desire may be to express through form the obsessive nature of certain
feelings-while the structural parallels, such as the four consecutive
sentences introduced by “Perhaps” and the “echo-phrases” (“her un-
ripening nights, her unfruitful slumbers”), seem equally stylized. For

POInfact, this method seems to have carried within it the seeds of its own supersession.
Sentences of indirect interior monologue appear in passages of omniscient description in
the works of Jane Austen and many later nineteenth-century novelists.
Heinemann’s Phoenix ed. (London, 1954), p. 457.

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DEREK BICKERTON 237

reasons as yet unexplained, these seem to be both common and distinc-

tive features of indirect interior monologue.22
Finally, as an example of the fourth type, we have direct interior
monologue from Joyce’s UZysses:
Weak joy opened his lips. Changed since the first letter. Wonder
did she write it herself. Doing the indignant: a girl of good
family like me, respectable character. Could meet one Sunday
after the rosary. Thank you: not having any. Usual love scrim-
mage. Then running round corners. Bad as a row with Molly.
Cigar has a cooling effect. Narcotic. Go further next time.
Naughty boy: punish: afraid of words, of course. Brutal, why not?
Try it anyhow. A bit at a time.
Fingering still the letter in his pocket he drew the pin out of
it. Common pin, eh? He threw it on the road. Out of her clothes
somewhere: pinned together. Queer the number of pins they
always have. No roses without thorns.28

Apart from three sentences of narrative, distinguishable by their use

of the third person, this is Bloom’s monologue throughout. But no
graphological signals separate monologue from narrative, Bloom’s o&
thoughts from the thoughts or words he supposes Martha Clifford to be
thinking or saying (“a girl of good family like me, respectable char-
acter”), or Bloom’s memory of words in Martha’s letter (“Naughty
boy: punish”) from his mental comment on them (“afraid of words,
of course”); nor does the passage contain a single reporting clause or
verb of saying. The resemblance to “spoken” direct speech shows even
more clearly if we replace the omitted subjects and auxiliaries: “She’s
changed since the first letter. I wonder did she write it herself. She’s
doing the indignant. W e could meet one Sunday after the rosary. No
thanks: I’m not having any.” But the difference between this and
soliloquy is further marked by dislocations of conventional grammar
and syntax and the intrusion of apparent irrelevancies such as the
effect of Bloom’s cigar.24
We may now, therefore, unsheathe our dagger definitions and pro-
pose the following:

‘gI have observed them in Conrad and Joyce, among others. They seem particularly
common in passages where the character is experiencing some strong emotion. But little
critical attention has so far been paid to the role of rhetorical devices in the novel.
=Bodley Head (London,1960), pp. 95-96.
“Spencer gives a comprehensive analysis of Joyce’s linguistic devices in UZysses.

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238 INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

(1) Inner speech can only be rendered ljy one of the methods used
for rendering spoken speech.
(2a) Soliloquy is inner speech rendered in direct speech.
(2b) Omniscient description is inner speech rendered in indirect
speech.
(2c) Indirect interior monologue is inner speech rendered in free
indirect speech.
(2d) Direct interior monologue is inner speech rendered in free
direct speech.
T h e passages quoted above were deliberately chosen to illustrate
these four modes in their purest possible state. Often, two or even
three modes may be found in the same passage. There is a strong ten-
dency for omniscient description to incorporate sentences of indirect
interior monologue. Similarly, a passage in either of these modes, or
one which mixes the two, may be climaxed by a sentence or two of
soliloquy (usually introduced by a verb of thinking and demarcated
by inverted commas). Direct interior monologue may modulate into
omniscient description as well as narrative. But the modes themselves
are distinct and invariable. Any given sentence can be assigned to one
or other of them; one never finds a sentence of soliloquy in indirect
speech, or one of indirect interior monologue with a first-person
subject.
T h e advantages of formal over conceptual definitions are consider-
able. It becomes possible to distinguish more clearly one mode from
another, thereby avoiding the confusions noted above, and to define
and study in more detail their differing effects; to compare more ac-
curately the approaches of different writers to their characters, or the
same writer to different characters. It should help us to confirm ob-
jectively some subjective judgments we make about texts, particularly
with regard to scales such as formality/colloquialism,or remoteness/
immediacy of presentation.
Light may even be cast on the nature of the creative process itself.
Most critics, even some with linguistic training, assume too readily that
> -

a writer first conceives of a new mode of literary expression in the

abstract and then seeks out or invents the techniques to implement it;
according to Bally, for instance, “Le style indirect libre est une creation
en partie artificielle et consciente de la langue litt&aire.”25 Yet, if
each mode demands consistent use of a particular type of speech, and if
Le Langage et la vie (Geneva, 1959, p. 111.

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DEREK BICKERTON 239

these types already existed in the spoken language, it would be as

reasonable to suppose that the -chosen type determined the viewpoint
as that the viewpoint determined the choice of type; that, for example,
indirect interior monologue developed not because writers were seek-
ing new means to express their characters’ viewpoints, but because
the gradual and at first largely accidental discarding of reporting ma-
terial lent a progressively more subjective coloring to the inner speech,
of which the more perceptive writers were quick to take advantage.26
Such a suggestion may seem heterodox, but at least it serves as a salu-
tary reminder that speech preceded literature and that the subtlest
fiction can be no more than a sophisticated development of the lan-
guage we all use.

University of Leeds

“What little evidence is available seems to bear this out. Ullmann (p . 101-17) shows
that free indirect speech occurs only rarely and “in a tentative and unzeveloped form”
in Flaubert’s earliest work: only in his later work is it used, with increasing frequency,
to portray the attitudes of his characters. And although Joyce read Les Lauriers sont
coup& as early as 1902 (Ellmann, p. 131), twelve years elapsed before he was able to use
what he had learned from Dujardln; his own rendering of inner speech had to develop
through the three stages of mhloqu omniscient description, and indirect interior mono-
logue before he was himself capabt of employing the direct form. Indeed, his earlier
works give p u n d s for believing that he might have arrived at it even if he had never
read Dujardin’s novel.

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