Abstract
This essay argues that one way to understand James’s late novels is as experiments with depicting his characters in states of semi-detachment. They are neither entirely removed from nor entirely immersed in their social and physical surroundings. James’s distinctive use of free indirect discourse and shifting focalization, along with some other strategies this article explores, introduce an abiding and productive uncertainty about where and when a particular sentence--and the thought that accompanies it--is taking place. That uncertainty is tellingly signposted not just in The Ambassadors (1903) and in the dictated notes that accompany The Sense of the Past .
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