In this article I propose to demonstrate some of the ways in which the theories and principles developed by linguists and conversational analysts for the systematic study of discourse and natural conversation may be illuminatingly applied to the stylistic and structural study of a fictional conversation within a literary text. I acknowledge at the outset that natural and fictional conversation differ in many ways. It is not merely that in fiction the talk is tidied-up, that there are relatively few unclear utterances, overlaps, false-starts, hesitations, and repetitions: there are also literary conventions at work governing the fictional representation of talk, so that the rendered text is quite different from a faithful transcription of a natural conversation. However certain structural and functional