Speech and thought presentation in stylistics

This chapter demonstrates the continuing importance of speech and thought presentation in the stylistic analysis of prose fi ction. It focuses in particular on the category of free indirect thought, which has historically been of great interest to narratologists and literary critics. Recent attacks on the usefulness of the speech and thought presentation categories, for example by adherents of a ‘theory of mind’ approach, have singled out free indirect thought as being unrepresentative of the variety of mental functioning to be found in prose fi ction. While supporting many of this group’s insights concerning the importance of ‘intermental thought’ and ‘the intermental mind’ in the novel, this chapter argues that this does not mean that the traditional categories of speech and thought presentation should be disregarded altogether. With particular attention to one recent experimental novel, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously-published The Pale King (2011), the chapter suggests that free indirect thought remains widespread in twenty-fi rst century fi ction, albeit in a different form to the most commonly studied examples of the style in the nineteenth-and twentieth-century novel. It demonstrates that free indirect thought can do more than represent a solitary individual consciousness in isolation, and that it is in fact ideally suited to the contemporary novel’s depiction of the confl ict between the individual and the vast impersonal and institutional forces of our current age.