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Thought presentation
Besides using narrators to present what their characters say, novelists
can also use them to present what their characters think. The presentation
of thought involves the same basic categories of presentation as the presentation
of speech does, but the effects of these categories are sometimes rather
different. This is essentially because, in real life, although when we
present or report the speech of others we have normally heard the speech
we report, we know that this can't possibly be the case for thought. Indeed,
even when we present our own thoughts, there is an issue, because it is
not at all clear how much verbalisation thought involves. So, the scale
of thought presentation appears to be formed on a sort of rough analogy
with the speech presentation scale. But the idea of reporting some original
utterance, and signalling how faithful (or close) to that original you
are claiming to be, doesn't really work for thought presentation. It is
this difference which gives rise to the possibility of different effects
for a presentational category, depending on whether it is being used to
present speech on the one hand, or thought on the other.
Note that in 1st-person narrations we would normally expect the narrator
only to present his or her own thoughts in the story about his or her
past. Logically, 1st-person narrators can only have direct access to their
own thoughts (though watch out for exceptions to this rule in a few novels,
with consequent rather odd effects). In 3rd-person narrations, on the
other hand, where the convention is that the narrator is omniscient, it
is common to get the thoughts of more than one character portrayed in
the same story, perhaps at different points in the story.
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