Thought Presentations LITERATURE REVIEW

2.6 Thought Presentations

In the study of fiction, the presentation of thought commonly employs five techniques, Direct Thought DT, Indirect Thought IT, Free Direct Thought FDT, Free Indirect Thought FIT, and Narrator’s Report of Thought Act NRTA. The examples below are compiled from Leech and Short 2007 and Halliday and Matthiessen 2004. Table 2.5.4 The Techniques of Thought Presentation Techniques Examples DT He wondered, ‘Do you still love me?’ IT He wondered if she still loved him. FDT Do you still love me? FIT Did she still love him? or Did she still live him, he wondered. NRTA He wondered about her love for him. The differences between those five techniques, as shown by the examples above, can be identified through the presence of quotation mark, the reporting verbs, the mood, the pronoun, and the tenses. First, DT paratactic can be easily recognized by the quotation mark. Among those five techniques, only DT that employs quotation mark. In addition to the quotation mark, DT bears a mental process verb. The mood, the pronouns, and the tense of the projected clause are not changed. Semino and Short 2004 list some reporting verbs that may be found in the thought presentation. Verbs such as ask, muse, and think are often found for DT. The use of DT makes the thought of the character explicit. “This is what the character would have said if he had made his thoughts explicit” Leech and Short, 2007: 277. Second, beside the similarity, IT hypotactic also has some differences from DT. Both of them have mental process verbs as the indicator of the projected clause. However, if DT can be easily identified by the presence of quotation mark, IT does not have the quotation mark. The mood, the pronoun, and the tense should be also adjusted. In the projected clause of the examples above, the interrogative mood is changed into the declarative mood, and the first person and second pronouns are changed into the third person pronouns. If in DT the tense is present, IT will be in past tense. Then the conjunction is sometimes needed to connect the two clauses. Admit, ask, believe, calculate, concede, decide, feel, fear, find, gather, guess, hope, know, note, notice, realize, recall, remember, remind, see, seem, suppose, suspect, tell, think, understand, wish and wonder often appear in IT. Next, FDT has some parts of DT, but as a free form it has some differences as well. The mood, the pronouns, and the tense of FDT are still the same with the DT. Nevertheless, FDT only shows the projected clause. It does not employ the projecting clause with the mental process verb. Furthermore, FDT does not need the quotation mark. It offers “the speed of thought and intimacy” Black, 2006: 143. In a text, it will be rather difficult to identify the presence of the free forms such as FDT. In Figure 2.5.2, there are some ways to identify the occurrence of FIT. One way is by seeing the moods. The most frequent moods appearing are the declarative, interrogative, and exclamative moods, and the easiest way is when the moods are non-declarative moods. The interrogative mood can express the need of a character for information or services, while the exclamative mood show the attitude of a character. Thus, those two moods will be automatically included in the free forms. The example of the interrogative mood as FDT can be seen as the following. But the journalist wanted the photo taken first, so the photographer ordered Mavis to the middle of the sofa, with the surviving children on either side of their distraught and grieving mother. She asked for the father too, of course. Jim? Is it Jim Albright? But Mavis said he wasn’t feeling so good, couldn’t come out, they’d have to go ahead without him. Toni Morrison’s Paradise, 1997: 21 As for the exclamative mood in the thought presentation of the omniscient narrator is illustrated in the example below taken from Verdonk 2002: 52. What a lark What a plunge For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now… Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, 1958: 45 Fourth, among those five techniques of thought presentation, FIT becomes common in modern fiction. Leech and Short 2007 state that FIT is used to gain sympathy for certain character. Nowadays, FIT is developed into the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique where “…the narrator creates the illusion that, without his or her interference readers have direct access to the mental process of the characters” Verdonk, 2002: 50. Leech and Short 2007, 277 also claim, “ … FIT is seen as a move to the right and hence away from the author’s most directly interpretative control and into the active mind of the character.” In terms of intimacy to the perception and motives of a character, Free Indirect Discourse FID makes the readers closer to the character in comparison to Direct Discourse DD Miall, 2008 where FIT is under FID, and DT is under DD Verdonk, 2002. It will allow the readers to make their own judgments about how the characters experience the world and the value system that exists. Some books have different opinion about the form of FIT, but this thesis tries to adapt those theories. The mood is the same with the projected idea in DT with different tense as in IT. Here, some sources put the projecting clause, while some others do not. The methods in Figure 2.5.2 can also be applied for FIT. The differences of FIT from FDT are only in the pronoun and tense. FIT can be identified using the mood systems as well. However, the problem is when the mood is declarative mood. The modality system, especially the modal auxiliaries, can be used as the indicator, for they mark the character consciousness and attitude which will not happen in the limited third person narrator or the narratorial mode BN. The example below is taken from Verdonk 2002: 49. It was difficult for her to endure his presence, for he would interfere with her . She could not recover her life. She rose stiffly and went down. She could neither eat nor talk during the meal. She sat absent, torn, without any being of her own… As soon as it was possible, she went upstairs again, and locked the bedroom door. She must be alone. D. H. Lawrence’s The Shadow in the Rose Garden, 1932: 201 Unlike the other moods, the occurrence of the free forms in declarative mood is more difficult to identify, especially when the clause has no modals. One of the ways is by analyzing whether a clause shows evaluation or judgment. Below is the example from Simpson 1993: 89 when the clause shows the evaluation. … he took the tuna off the gaff hook and put the gaff back in place. He put one knee on the fish and cut strips of dark red meat longitudinally from the back of the head to the tail. They were wedge- shaped strips and he cut them from next to the backbone down to edge of the belly. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, 1952: 21 The thought of the character above is in the form of relational process rather than mental process that show the evaluation about the tuna. Last, NRTA is the device where narrators can give comments or enter the mind of the characters even to the inaccessible mind. In some cases, it shows the blend of the cognition with the emotive side of the characters. As stated by Black 2006, 141, “It is a very flexible device which allows the juxtaposition of the character’s thoughts with narratorial comment.” It can also be combined with other type of thought presentation. The example below, which is taken from Conrad’s The Secret Agent is used by Black 2006 He could say nothing; for the tenderness to all pain and all misery, the desire to make the horse happy and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take them to bed with him. And that, he knew, was impossible. For Stevie was not mad. It was, as it were, a symbolic longing . . . Conrad, 1907: 139 According to Black 2006, here, the narrator gives comments bizarre longing to the mind of the character.

2.7 Related Studies