Les représentations de la parole intérieure

Abstract

Alain Rabatel : Representations of inner speech. Interior monologue, free direct speech, free indirect speech and point of view The construction of a meta-discourse in order to describe interior monologues (IM) cuts across narratologic and linguistic approaches. It varies according to whether the purpose is to establish a typology based on their wider representation or to provide a linguistic analysis restricted to reported speech. The paper highlights the persistent under-rating of a phenomenon close to the IM, and related to the "unspeakable sentence", that of "the point of view". The represented "point of view" and the free indirect speech have coexisted since the second half of the 19th. However, unlike as in the IM, these forms are not clearly differentiated as dual forms of the expression of the inner speech. Consequently, inner speech (at least as a theory issued from literary experience) is reduced to the relatively homogeneous form of the "interior speech" or "flow of consciousness". But this representation is under the influence of enormous tensions as literary manifestations of inner speech are more varied than the phrase IM gives to understand.