First Person Interior Monologues:
Narrative Distance and Chronology,
The Nation Thief and The Sound and the Fury

 

This paper was written as an assignment for ENGL 501R: MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL, Dr. Craig Barrow, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 24 Apr. 1988.

© Bill Stifler, 1988

 

The distinction between interior monologues in third-person texts and first-person texts lies not in the proximity to the consciousness of the mind observed but in the nature of the mind observing. As Dorrit Cohn points out in Transparent Minds, "the direct expression of a character's thought [in third-person narration] will always be a quotation," in her terminology, a "quoted monologue" (Cohn 15).

First-person interior monologue, however, implies retrospection (Cohn 14), a re-creation of earlier memory, implying both a narrative distance from that earlier self and the possibility for a dynamic rearranging of memories. These two axes of chronology and narration yield a temporal range from sequential to associative, and a narrative range of a maximum distance between the narrating self and the experiencing self, and a zero limit where the narrating self is subsumed in the experiencing self (Cohn 183+) so that, in Joyce's words, "the reader finds himself established . . . in the thought of the principal personage, and the uninterrupted unrolling of that thought, replacing the previous form of narrative, conveys to us what the personage is doing and what is happening to him" (qtd. in Cohn 173).

Houston's The Nation Thief explores the distance between the narrating self and the experiencing self (chronology retaining its normal sequentiality). Not only does each narration appear as testimony to the question posed by Walker in the prologue [whether Walker is a hero or a monster (Houston x)], but each is personal testimony: a self-narration (Cohn 14) where the narrating self seeks to explain, defend, abrogate, justify, or absolve the actions and consciousness of the experiencing self.

This confessional tone is marked by numerous references by the narrators to unidentified audiences to their discourses: Guy Sartain's use of "sir" and "you" (Houston 6, 7, 11, 145, 190); Chelon's "muchachos" and "companeros" (Houston 12, 13, 15, 38, 89, 121, 206); Holdich's "gentlemen" (Houston 17, 24, 29, 95, 170); Hon. John Wheeler's "my friends" (Houston 78, 81, 137). This need for confession or justification is often an attempt to dissassociate the narrating self from the guilt associated with the experiencing self.

This dissonant self-narration (Cohn 145+) often appears early in a character's narration: Holdich--"I was twenty-three, you have to keep remembering that" (Houston 17); Sartain--"They have asked me, sir, why a Negro would want to go down there with William Walker. Well, first he wasn't then what he was later" (Houston 6). Even characters, who because of their lower social standing were less concerned with public opinion, reveal early misgivings: Warner--"Great God A'mighty, I wish I'd known some things then!" (Houston 5); Chelon--"It's true, God forgive the ignorance of a poor, fucked, fat Indian with a stiff leg" (Houston 12).

Houson uses the cumulative effect of these dissonant narrations, the ultimate individual breaks with Walker, and Walker's ultimate failure and incarceration appear like testimony in his trial creating an ironic distance between Walker's statement in the prologue "I have created William Walker in Central America" (Houston ix) and the pathos of "There should be more. He had imagined there would be more" (Houston 238). In the end, Walker is the silent witness to the narrative discourses of the novel, and judged by his peers, these testimonies serve as the bridge between his confident "he has not come to fear death" (Houston x) and the final "He had not thought there would be such terror" (Houston 238).

Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury emphasizes the chronological axis rather than the relationship of narrating self to experiencing self. In fact, the moment of locution remains ambiguous; the reader is unable to decide whether the narration occurs simultaneously with the action of the day or at the end of the day just prior to sleep (Cohn 250) [Cohn's identification of these monologues as memory monologues assumes the latter (Cohn 251)]. With regard to Quentin's monologue, Sartre even suggests the possibility of a post mortem origin (Cohn 316).

By using an automonous monologue for his characters, bracketed from the moment of narration, Faulkner is free to focus attention on the achronology of events in the narrator's mind, making these associations the "setting" for the story. This association of ideas--or "thought transferrences" as Faulkner referred to them (Cohn 251)--leave the monologues void of self-analysis or cause and effect relationships, shifting the focus away from the present moment back to the past. When Benjy snags his coat on the fence walking with Luster, he remembers a time when he caught his clothes on the fence walking with Caddy while delivering Uncle Maury's love notes (Faulkner 2). Passing the carriage house, Benjy remembers riding the carriage to the graveyard with T.P. (Faulkner 6). Quentin's fight with Gerald becomes his fight with Dalton Ames (Faulkner 115-128).

Bracketing the normal sequence of temporal causality, Faulkner forces the reader to discover meaning analogously within the consciousness of each narrator, that is, to discover the "why" of these associations of memories. In this way, the novel proceeds thematically rather than developmentally. Associations of cruelty and selfishness (Luster's, Maury's, Mrs. Compson's, Jason's), death (Damuddy's, Quentin's, Mr. Compson's, Roskus's) or sexuality (Caddy and the perfume, Caddy kissing Charlie, Benjy's castration, Caddy and Quentin's loss of virginity, Herbert, Gerald, Dalton Ames, Caddy's wedding) resonate within the text creating overtones of tension.

The final scene of the novel, the sense of order precariously restored in Benjy's mind, becomes a paradigm of the fall of the Compson family. Benjy, the broken flower of the family's destruction drooping in his hand, is trapped in a consciousness that can admit no change, where order is synonymous with stagnation and death (Faulkner 249).

 

Works Cited

Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Random House, 1956.

Houston, Robert. The Nation Thief. New York: Ballantine Books, 1984.

 

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