4
EXPRESSIVITY II: FORM
The qualities and quantities of dialogue vary with the levels of conflict used in the storytelling.
THE CONFLICT COMPLEX
Conflict disrupts our lives from any one of four levels: the physical (time, space, and everything in it), the social (institutions and the individuals in them), the personal (relationships of intimacy—friends, family, lovers), and the private (conscious and subconscious thoughts and feelings). The difference between a complicated story and a complex story, between a story with minimum dialogue versus maximum dialogue, hinges on the layers of conflict the writer chooses to dramatize.
The action genres put their protagonists up against physical conflict almost exclusively. For example, J. C. Chandor’s film ALL IS LOST. On the other hand, the novelistic technique of stream of consciousness submerges the telling entirely at the layer of inner conflict. There, it churns crosscurrents of dream and memory, of regret and yearning that flood the protagonist’s mind. For example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
Filmmakers like Chandor, who strive for a purity of objectivity, or authors like Woolf, who seek a purity of subjectivity, complicate their works at the extreme of only one level of conflict. As a result, their genius crafts a compelling story with little or no need for spoken dialogue. Stories told with highly kinetic concentration at just one level of life are complicated, often dazzlingly so, but, in my definition, not complex.
Complex stories embrace two, three, or even all four levels of human conflict. Authors with worldviews both wide and deep often bracket their tellings with inner conflict at one level, physical strife at another, and then concentrate on the middle ranges of social and personal conflicts—the two venues of talk.
Personal conflicts embroil friends, family, and lovers. Intimacy, by its nature, begins in talk, then builds, changes, and ends in talk. Personal conflicts, therefore, roil with multilayered, multi-meaning dialogue.
For example, this exchange between Walter White and his wife, Skyler, in Season 4, Episode 6 of BREAKING BAD. From the first season’s first episode on, Walter White’s characterization portrays a nervous, insecure, defensive man. But by the end of this scene we glimpse his true character.
INT. BEDROOM—DAY.
Husband and wife sit on the bed.
SKYLER
I said before, if you are in danger, we go to the police.
WALTER
No, I don’t want to hear about the police.
SKYLER
I do not say that lightly. I know what it could do to this family, but if it is the only real choice we have, if it’s either that or you getting shot when you open your front door—
WALTER
—I don’t want to hear about the police.
SKYLER
You’re not some hardened criminal, Walt. You are in over your head. That’s what we tell them, that’s the truth.
WALTER
That’s not the truth.
SKYLER
Of course it is. A schoolteacher, cancer, desperate for money—
WALTER
(getting up)
—We’re done.
SKYLER
—roped into working, unable to quit. You told me that yourself, Walt. Jesus, what was I thinking?
(pause)
Walt, please, let’s both of us stop trying to justify this whole thing, and admit you’re in danger.
WALTER
Who are you talking to right now? Who is it you think you see?
(pause)
Do you know how much I make a year? Even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it. Do you know what would happen if I suddenly decided to stop going to work? A business big enough that it could be listed on the NASDAQ goes belly up. Disappears. It ceases to exist without me.
(pause)
No, you clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens a door and gets shot. You think that’s me? No, I am the one who knocks.
He walks out of the bedroom; Skyler stares after him.
Walter is describing his new, other self, the doppelgänger we come to know as Heisenberg. Skyler, dumbfounded by her husband’s words, can only grasp for the meaning.
Social conflicts surge through institutions of public purpose: medical, educational, military, religious, governmental, corporate—all societal enterprises, legal and criminal. As people move from personal to social relationships, they often speak with less sincerity and greater formality. When public conflicts peak, characters break into speeches.
Consider this example from HOUSE OF CARDS. A political operative rejects a proposal from Frank Underwood. As the operative walks off, Frank turns to camera with this aside:
FRANK
Such a waste of talent. He chose money over power. In this town a mistake nearly everyone makes. Money is the McMansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after ten years; power is the old stone building that stands for centuries. I cannot respect someone who does not see the difference.
To generalize: The more physical and social a story’s conflicts, the less the dialogue; the more personal and private the conflicts, the more the dialogue.
Therefore, to create a complex story, the writer must master the double dimension of dialogue—the outer aspect of what is said versus the inner truth of what is thought and felt. When first spoken, a line of dialogue conveys a surface meaning, the meaning the speaker hopes other characters will believe in and act on. This first meaning seems logical in its context, conveys a sense of character purpose and tactic, and arouses curiosity as we glance across the scene to see its effect. The language itself may also delight us with tropes or wordplay, especially when written for the stage. In the next moment, however, this solid speech seems to dissolve, and we sense a second, deeper meaning hidden behind the words.
Thanks to our powers of intuition and perception, character-specific dialogue inspires a sudden insight into the character’s ineffable inner self, his unseen needs and desires. True-to-character talk lets us read past conscious thoughts and sense unspoken feelings down to a character’s subconscious urges. This effect is so powerful that the fullness and depth of insight we have into fictional characters often surpasses what we glimpse in the living people around us.
Dialogue, at its best, hangs suspended between a character’s public face and her secret self. Like multifaceted crystals, her spoken words refract and reflect aspects of her inner and outer lives. Because personal and social lives begin, evolve, and end through talk, the complex relationships and conflicts between human beings cannot be fully dramatized without expressive, character-specific dialogue.
Inept dialogue, on the other hand, not only rings false, but also shallows out the characters who speak it. Weak dialogue suffers from many faults such as poor word choices, but the root cause runs much deeper:
Dialogue problems are story problems.
With almost algebraic symmetry, the worse the storytelling, the worse the dialogue. And because stories are so often hackneyed, we suffer dissonant dialogue in countless films and plays and on hundreds of TV channels. The same is true of the novel. Although modern prose often speeds the read with page after page of dialogue, when was the last time you were deeply moved by a chapter of talk? The majority of dialogue published or performed is serviceable at best and instantly forgotten.
We’re drawn to stories not only because they reflect the life around us, but also because they illuminate the life within. One of the great pleasures of story is staring, self-absorbed, into the mirror of fiction. Dialogue shows us how we lie to others, how we lie to ourselves, how we love, how we beg, how we fight, how we see the world. Dialogue teaches us what could or should be said in life’s harshest or most rapturous moments.
DIALOGUE ONSTAGE
The stage is a symbolic space. From that moment untold millennia ago when the first actor stood up to perform a story for his tribe, audiences have instinctively understood that what is said and done in that precious space means far more than words and gestures.1
The stage puts the artificiality of art on open display. In the ritual of theatre, actors act out fictional people in the living presence of other people, everyone breathing the same air, all the while pretending that this unreality is, for the moment, real. By taking her seat, the theatergoer signs an implicit contract with the playwright: He may turn the onstage space into any world he imagines, symbolic of whatever meaning he wishes to express; she in turn will suspend her disbelief and react to his characters as if they were living their lives in front of her.
Are there limits to the “as if” convention? Apparently not. Since the advent of Dada over a century ago, audiences have signed on for the wildest rides, embracing surrealist plays such as André Breton’s If You Please (1920), Theatre of the Absurd pieces such as Eugène Ionesco’s anti-play The Bald Soprano (1950), the fragmentations of the Furth and Sondheim concept musical Company (1970), and the literally hundreds of avant-garde plays performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe every August.
The “as if” conspiracy between author and audience licenses playwrights to write dialogue at heights and depths of sublimity no human being has ever actually spoken. From the master dramatists of classical Greece, through Shakespeare, Ibsen, and O’Neill, to contemporaries like Jez Butterworth, Mark O’Rowe, and Richard Marsh, playwrights have used imagistic language and verse rhythms to intensify dialogue with poetic force. And the audience listens because in the theatre we want to hear first, see second.
What’s more, the stage inspires the constant exploration and reinvention of language. When Shakespeare couldn’t find the word he wanted, he made one up: barefaced, obscene, eyeball, lonely, zany, gloomy, gnarled, bump, elbow, amazement, torture, and over 1,700 other words are Shakespeare’s invention.
From the naturalistic barroom grit of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh to the poetic elegance of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, the spectrum of language in the theatre is unmatched in the other media of story.
For example, consider the coffee table talk in Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage as translated by Christopher Hampton. Two couples begin the evening discussing a playground fight between their children. Their civilized conversation, lubricated with alcohol, descends into ugly truths about their marriages. In the dialogue below, both wives use sharp “as if” similes to belittle their husbands.
MICHAEL: Drinking always makes you unhappy.
VERONICA: Michael, every word that comes out of your mouth is destroying me. I don’t drink. I drank a mouthful of this shitty rum you’re waving about as if you were showing the congregation the Shroud of Turin. I don’t drink and I bitterly regret it. It’d be a relief to be able to take refuge in a little drop at every minor setback.
ANNETTE: My husband’s unhappy as well. Look at him. Slumped. He looks as if someone left him by the side of the road. I think it’s the unhappiest day of his life.2
Now compare the phlegmatic ridicule of these two wives to this vibrant speech from Blood Wedding (1933) by Federico García Lorca, translated by Fernanda Diaz. As a servant sets the table for a wedding, she warns the bride of a coming tragedy, spinning trope upon trope:
SERVANT:
For the wedding night
let the warping moon
part the black leaves
and gaze down
For the wedding night
let the frost burn,
let the acid almond
turn sweet as honey.
O exquisite woman
your wedding night nears.
Tighten your gown, hide
beneath your husband’s wing.
He is a dove
with a breast of fire.
Never leave the house.
The fields wait for the cry
of eloping blood.
To the ancient “as if” convention of the legit theatre, the musical theatre adds yet another glaze, transfiguring the poetics of spoken lines into lyrics and arias that heighten emotion the way dance enhances gesture. Indeed, all the principles and techniques of dialogue discussed in this book apply to musical theatre. From the recitativo of opera to the sung-through scenes of the modern musical, characters who sing and dance vocalize dialogue into music. Songs are simply another form of in-character talk.
Theatre audiences hold to their belief in the “as if” so long as the play creates an internally consistent setting in which characters talk (or sing) in a manner that seems true to their world and to themselves; in other words, as long as dialogue stays in-character. For without credibility, stories risk billowing into meaningless, emotionless spectacles.
DIALOGUE IN FILM
A camera can fly through 360 degrees of global reality, devouring every object, shape, and color in its path. Anything a writer can dream, CGIs can duplicate beyond his dreams. Because the big screen foregrounds images and backgrounds sounds, film audiences instinctively absorb the story through their eyes, while they half listen to the score, sound effects, and dialogue.
In fact, for some cinema purists, the ideal film would be wordless. I appreciate their aesthetic, but while it’s true that moving moments in film are often mute, when I compare the best silent films with the finest sound films, for me, stories told with audible dialogue win hands down. The image of Thelma and Louise driving over a cliff into the Grand Canyon shines vividly in my memory, but as I recall, they were shouting a joyful “Keep going!” as they did. Without that line, the impact of their suicide would have been halved.
Although storytelling on the big screen clearly favors image over language, the balance varies greatly from genre to genre. An Action/Adventure film, such as ALL IS LOST, is told with no dialogue, whereas an education plot, such as MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, is told in all dialogue.
The greatest difference between the screen versus stage and page, therefore, is not the quantity of dialogue but the quality. The camera and microphone so magnify and amplify behavior, that every phony glance, every false gesture, every affected line looks and sounds more amateur than the worst dinner party charade. Screen acting calls for a naturalistic, believable, and seemingly offhanded technique. To make this possible, screen dialogue must feel spontaneous. When forced to deliver ornamented dialogue, even the finest actors sound ludicrous, cueing the audience to react with “People don’t talk like that.” This holds true in all genres, realistic and nonrealistic, in television and film.
There are, of course, exceptions.
One: Stylized Realism
Realism bends with a certain elasticity. Setting a story in an unfamiliar world allows the writer to enhance dialogue with greater figurative language than a commonplace location, but the talk must still stay within the realm of believability that the story’s world sets for itself. A film or television series in a foreign setting (THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL and HOMELAND), a criminal society (PULP FICTION and DEADWOOD), a regional culture (BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD and JUSTIFIED), or the distant past (SPARTACUS and VIKINGS) can take dialogue well beyond the everyday, so long as it maintains credibility within its self-imposed limits.
In these exotic cases consistency becomes a problem. The writer must be able to sustain an eccentric yet believable style over a full-length film or even long-form television series such as THE WIRE. No easy task.
Two: Nonrealism
Genres of nonrealism (science fiction, musical, animation, fantasy, horror, and farce) tend to tell allegorical stories, acted out by archetypal or symbolic characters. In these genres, audiences not only accept but also enjoy highly stylized dialogue. Think of THE MATRIX, 300, CORPSE BRIDE, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, DR. SEUSS’ THE CAT IN THE HAT, GAME OF THRONES, or GLEE.
Three: Extreme Characters
In life, some people outfeel, outthink, and outtalk the people around them. Such characters deserve and should get imaginative, one-of-a-kind dialogue.
Suppose you were writing for extreme characters such as Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in BREAKING BAD; Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) in PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN; Melvin Udall in AS GOOD AS IT GETS, Jimmy Hoffa in HOFFA, or Frank Costello in THE DEPARTED (all played by Jack Nicholson); or Sophie Zawistowski in SOPHIE’S CHOICE, Suzanne Vale in POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, or Margaret Thatcher in THE IRON LADY (all played by Meryl Streep). Excellent writers gave these bigger-than-life characters image-rich language that attracted actors who knew what to do with it.
Consider these two characters: Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) and Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) from THE BIG SLEEP (1946). William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman adapted the film from Raymond Chandler’s novel. In Hollywood jargon, the film is a crimedy, the merger of two genres: crime story and romantic comedy. Repartee and mimicry leaven the intrigue and gunplay. In one sequence, for example, Marlowe, a private detective, pretends to be a gay rare book collector.
In the scene below, Marlowe meets his client’s daughter, Vivian. The two use racehorses as metaphors for themselves, and horse racing as a metaphor for sex. Their flirtation characterizes them as quick-witted, worldly-wise, self-assured, amusing, and mutually attracted. (To “rate” a Thoroughbred means to restrain the horse early in a race in order to conserve its energy for the finish.)
VIVIAN
Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first to see if they’re front-runners or come from behind, find out what their hole card is, what makes them run.
MARLOWE
Find out mine?
VIVIAN
I think so. I’d say you don’t like to be rated, you like to get out in front, open up a lead, take a little breather in the backstretch, then come home free.
MARLOWE
You don’t like to be rated yourself.
MARLOWE
Well, I can’t tell till I’ve seen you over a distance of ground. You got a touch of class but… I don’t know how far you can go.
VIVIAN
That depends on who’s in the saddle.
MARLOWE
There’s one thing I still can’t figure out.
VIVIAN
What makes me run?
MARLOWE
Uh-huh.
VIVIAN
I’ll give you a little hint. Sugar won’t work. It’s been tried.
When writing for the screen, even within the most fantasied genres, always write for the actor. Language knows no limits, but acting does. Once your work is in production, an actor will have to act your lines with clarity and conviction. Therefore, what’s said must be kept within the realm of what’s actable. This demand leads to a major difference between dialogue for the stage versus the screen: improvisation.
In the theatre, the playwright owns the play’s copyright. As a result, actors may not improvise or paraphrase dialogue without the author’s permission. In film and television, however, the writer assigns copyright to the production company, so that when the need arises, directors, editors, and actors can cut, change, or add dialogue. The professional reality of writing for the screen is that the script you write may not be performed verbatim as you wrote it. As a result, sadly, an actor’s improvisations may diminish your work.
Inept improvisations are easy to spot. When spontaneity blears and actors lose track, they often buy time by repeating each other’s cues until the scene sounds like an echo chamber:
ACTOR A
I think it’s time for you to leave.
ACTOR B
So you want me to leave, huh? Well, I’m not going anywhere until you listen to what I have to say.
ACTOR A
I’ve listened to everything you have to say and none of it makes sense.
ACTOR B
Sense? Sense? You want me to make sense? What did I say that didn’t make sense?
And on they ramble.
In rare cases, however, such as Robert DeNiro’s “You talkin’ to me?” riff in TAXI DRIVER, an actor’s improvisation eclipses the script. In FORREST GUMP, for example, Forrest (Tom Hanks) joins the army and befriends fellow enlistee Bubba Blue (Mykelti Williamson). During a montage of their boot-camp labors, Williamson improvises this passage as transcribed from the screen:
Bubba Blue: Anyway, like I was sayin’, shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, sauté it. Dey’s uh, shrimp kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan-fried, deep-fried, stir-fried. There’s pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, cave shrimp, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, cave shrimp. That– that’s about it.”
Notice that Williamson used “cave shrimp,” a colorless crustacean found in the subterranean streams of Alabama and Kentucky, twice. Even the best of improvisations are prone to accidental repetition.
DIALOGUE ON TELEVISION
Comparing film to television, film (with exceptions) likes to take the camera out-of-doors onto the streets and into nature; television (with exceptions) gravitates toward indoor stories of families, friends, lovers, and coworkers. For that reason, television tends to write more face-to-face scenes, leaning the balance of dialogue versus image toward talk for three reasons:
1) The small screen. Facial expressions are hard to read in full-length shots. This motivates the television camera to close in on a character’s face, and when it does, that face talks.
2) Genre. Television favors genres such as family comedy, family drama, the love story, the buddy story, and professional dramas of all kinds (cops, criminals, lawyers, doctors, psychologists, etc.). These series frame personal relationships in homes and workplaces where intimacy begins, changes, and ends first and foremost through talk.
3) Small budgets. Image costs money, resulting in high film budgets. Because dialogue is relatively inexpensive to stage and shoot, television’s limited budgets encourage talk.
Looking toward the future, if wall-mounted screens continue to grow in size and popularity, TV budgets will also rise, causing a spike in subscription fees. In time, large home screens will merge film and television into one grand medium—the screen. On the other hand, when not at home, people will consume stories on their iPads and iPhones, thus keeping dialogue critical to the tellings. In either case, however, movie theatres will close.
DIALOGUE IN PROSE
Prose translates conflicts from the private, personal, social, and physical realms into word-pictures, often colored by the inner lives of characters, before projecting them onto the reader’s imagination. Consequently, prose writers pour their most vivid, high-intensity language into first-or third-person narration rather than exchanges of dialogue. Indeed, free indirect dialogue turns speech itself into narration. When prose writers do use direct dialogue in dramatized scenes, they often restrict themselves to very naturalist language in order to contrast the plainness of talk with the figurative potency of their narration. With exceptions, such as Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne, many novelists and short-story writers use quoted dialogue as a technique to simply change pace or break up blocks of prose.
The stage and screen confine dialogue to acted scenes and occasional direct address that soliloquizes or narrates. Both media rely on actors to enrich their characters with subtext and the paralanguages of tonality, gesture, and facial expression. For that reason, an author’s expressivity in the theatre or on film and television has to work within the possibilities of the actor’s art. But because prose performs in the reader’s imagination, it offers the writer the widest spectrum of dialogue styles.
At one end of the continuum, prose creates conventional scenes that could be transplanted directly to the stage or screen without changing a word. In the middle ranges, the first-person voice becomes a novel-length, uninterrupted speech composed of tens of thousands of words, all spoken to the reader. Some authors turn away from the reader, as it were, and distill thought into inner dialogues—secret conversations argued between the many voices of a multifaceted self. Finally, at the far opposite edge of the spectrum, third-person prose often eliminates quotation marks and characterized voices altogether to subsume character talk into free indirect dialogue.
Chapter One looked at the three categories of point of view in prose and how they affect the qualities and quantities of dialogue. Now, let’s take those distinctions into more depth and detail by grouping the many varieties of prose dialogue into two grand modes: in-character versus non-character.
Non-Character Narration
The non-character side of prose tells its stories through a third-person narrator, an intelligence that is neither a character nor the real-life voice of the author, but a guiding awareness a writer invents and then endows with varying degrees of omniscience and objectivity to describe characters and events as well as provide commentary in various kinds of discourse.
A non-character narrator can present dialogue explicitly in dramatized scenes or implicitly via narratized indirect dialogue. Consider this from the short story “The Widow Predicament” by David Means:
They sat across from each other at the Hudson House and conversed. His skin was weathered and he talked about Iceland most of the time until rising naturally out of his talk was the suggestion that perhaps she might want to see the country someday; nothing about dancing on the lip of volcanoes, or throwing themselves into one sacrificially, but a hint of it.3
Indirect dialogue in non-character narration gives the writer the usual assets of direct dialogue. It channels exposition when the reader needs to know that the talk took place and the upshot of what was said. It characterizes the speaker in terms of what the character talks about, although not how he says it. And as in the example above, the narration that surrounds indirect dialogue can express its subtext. Note how Means describes subtext as something “rising naturally out of his talk,” and uses the words “suggestion” and “hint” to convey a sense of ineffability.
The two chief benefits of indirect dialogue in non-character narration are 1) acceleration of pace, and 2) protection against banality. The dinner table talk about Iceland that Means summarized in a phrase could have gone on for an hour. He saved us from that. And unless his character could describe with a Hemingwayesque eye, Means knew best to leave landscape adjectives off-page.
The characterless voice of a third-person narration can be quite distant, observant, and objective.
For example, a Joseph Conrad narrator describes a tropical dawn:
The smooth darkness grew paler and became blotchy with ill-defined shapes, as if a new universe were being evolved out of somber chaos. Then outlines came out, defining forms without any details, indicating here a tree, there a bush; a black belt of forest far off. The day came rapidly, dismal and oppressed by the fog of the river and the heavy vapors of the sky—a day without color and without sunshine: incomplete, disappointing, sad.
When non-character awareness moves in the opposite direction and becomes intimate, imitative, and subjective, it adopts a stream of consciousness mode to invade the unsaid and unsayable realms and mirror a character’s inner life. This technique mixes the third-person narrator’s composure with the character’s emotional energies and word choices, melding into the role, replicating her thought processes, generating the impression of inner dialogue but without crossing the line to an in-character voice.
Consider, for example, this passage from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s non-character narrator uses words plucked from Clarissa Dalloway’s vocabulary (“lark,” “plunge,” “something awful”) to emulate the flow of memory:
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she can hear now, she burst open the French windows and plunged into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen…
Not all stream of consciousness “streams” with Virginia Woolf’s breathless fluidity. Some interiorized passages zigzag or circle or pulse (see the Ken Kesey and David Means examples below). For that reason, some schools of writing use “stream of consciousness” and “inner dialogue” interchangeably as if the terms were synonyms. But for the purposes of this book, I give them distinct definitions. I draw the line with the answer to this question: Who is talking to whom? Stream of consciousness uses a third-person non-character voice to talk to the reader (as in the Woolf example above); inner dialogue uses a character’s voice in first or second person to talk to himself (as in the Nabokov example below).
The In-Character Voice
The in-character side of prose speaks with character-specific voices. Dialogue, as I previously defined the term, includes all purposeful character talk, whether spoken in duologues with other characters, said to the reader, or by the character talking to herself. As we noted in Chapter One, because prose does its acting in the reader’s imagination, it offers a far greater range of in-character techniques than stage or screen. In-character prose employs six tactics: 1) dramatized dialogue, 2) first-person direct address, 3) indirect dialogue, 4) inner dialogue, 5) paralanguage, and 6) mixed techniques (see Chapter Five for the last two tactics).
Dramatized Dialogue
In the novel, dramatized dialogue rarely reaches the intensity of a verse play. Nonetheless, within the limits of genre and characterizations set by the author, figurative language may enhance scenes, just as it does onstage and onscreen. First-person narrators often enact “I said”/“she said”/“he said” scenes, purely dramatized and without commentary.
Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men is narrated by Jack Burden, an aide to a ruthless politician and the novel’s central character, Willie Stark, a.k.a. the Boss. Stark needs a secret piece of dirt to smear the reputation of a political foe, Judge Irwin. Note how Stark uses the decades that span from diapers to the coffin as a metaphor for life:
It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me… “There is always something.”
And I said, “Maybe not on the Judge.”
And he said, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”4
Direct Address
First-person narration is first cousin to soliloquys onstage and in-character voice-overs onscreen. In all three cases a character speaks directly to the person consuming the story. More often than not, the protagonist narrates his or her story, but occasionally a supporting character does the talking. Direct address can be more or less emotional, more or less objective, the specific tone dependent on the personality of the narrator.
Here, a Rudyard Kipling protagonist recalls looking out to sea and describes the wide, calm, objective pleasure of his experience to the reader:
I remember the windjammer as she sailed toward me. The setting sun ablaze astern. Out flung water at her feet, her shadow slashed rope furled sails bulging sideways like insolent cheeks of angels.
Or, a first-person narrator’s view may contract, blinded by strong emotions or lesser degrees of sanity. In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a patient in a mental hospital, “Chief” Bromden, begins the novel with:
They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them. They’re mopping when I come out of the dorm, all three of them sulky and hating everything, the time of day, the place they’re at here, the people they got to work around. When they hate like this, better if they don’t see me. I creep along the wall quiet as dust in my canvas shoes, but they got special sensitive equipment to detect my fear and they all look up, all three at once, eyes glittering out of the black faces like the hard glitter of radio tubes out of the back of an old radio.5
Bromden’s imaginings of unseen orgies and fear-detecting technology, enriched with his metaphors (quiet as dust) and similes (faces like the hard glitter of radio tubes) express his paranoid inner life, but at the same time, give the impression that despite the Chief’s constricted, insane thoughts, he is knowingly talking to us, the reader.
Indirect Dialogue
When a non-character third-person narrator uses indirect dialogue, subtext often becomes text. For example, in the David Means scene above, his third-person narrator tells the reader what was not said: “… nothing about dancing on the lip of volcanoes, or throwing themselves into one sacrificially, but a hint of it.”
When in-character first-or second-person prose relates indirect dialogue, subtext can only be implied because a first-person narrator doesn’t have access to his own subconscious. For example, this scene from The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes: Webster, the protagonist, wants to take action against an ex-lover because she won’t give him a letter he believes is rightfully his, so he consults a lawyer:
Mr. Gunnell is a calm, gaunt man who doesn’t mind silence. After all, it costs his clients just as much as speech.
“Mr. Webster.”
“Mr. Gunnell.”
And so we mistered one another for the next forty-five minutes, in which he gave me the professional advice I was paying for. He told me that going to the police and trying to persuade them to lay a charge of theft against a woman of mature years who had recently lost her mother would, in his view, be foolish. I liked that. Not the advice, but the way he expressed it. “Foolish”: much better than “inadvisable” or “inappropriate.”6
The reader senses that beneath his glib approval of Gunnell’s choice of words, Webster rages.
Inner Dialogue
Onstage and onscreen, the actor brings the unsaid to life within her performance, where it stays mute in the subtext. But when novelists and short-story writers wish, they can turn subtext into text and convert the unsaid directly into literature. The chief difference, therefore, between in-character direct address and inner dialogue is who’s listening. A first-person voice narrates to the reader; an inner dialogist talks to himself.
Lolita, for example, begins with Vladimir Nabokov’s protagonist, Humbert Humbert, in self-celebration:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Humbert is not talking to us. Rather, we sit outside, listening as his inward-facing mind revels in memories. To capture this self-absorbed admixture of sex and worship, Nabokov opens with metaphors for passion as prayer, then focuses on Humbert’s tongue as it pounds “t” sounds in alliteration.
Compare Humbert’s masturbatory fantasy with a passage from “The Knocking,” a short story by David Means. Means’s protagonist talks directly to us as he reclines in his New York apartment, listening to the tenant above him hang pictures or do repairs. His in-character voice guides us through his hopscotching thoughts as they leap from now to then and back to now.
A piercingly sharp metallic tap, not too loud and not too soft, coming out from under the casual noise of summer afternoon—the roar of traffic on Fifth combined with high heel taps, taxi horns, and the murmur of voices—again, many of these knockings come late in the day when he knows, because he knows, that I’m in my deepest state of reverie, trying to ponder—what else can one do!—the nature of my sadness in relation to my past actions, throwing out, silently, wordlessly, my theorems: Love is a blank senseless vibration that, when picked up by another soul, brings form to something that feels eternal (like our marriage) and then tapers and thins and becomes wispy, barely audible (the final days in the house along the Hudson) and then, finally, nothing but air unable to move anything (the deep persistent silence of loss).
Inner dialogue mimics free association to leapfrog through a character’s mind. When we glance in the cracks between the images, we glimpse the unsayable.
To sum up: from stage to screen to page, the nature, need, and expressivity of dialogue vary considerably. Stage dialogue is the most embellished, screen dialogue the most concise, and prose dialogue the most mutable.