Character’s Inner Speech as Effective Way of Literary Discourse Organization (Novel “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro)

Abstract

The article examines the protagonist’s verbalized inner speech in the literary text of the novel “The Remains of the Day” as a way of literary discourse organization by English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. The relevance of the study is explained by the interest in the analysis of the inner speech of characters in a literary text, which differs from the natural inner speech of an individual in the ways of linguistic expression, the specifics in the structure of the narrative. It is shown that the study of the inner speech of a character of literary discourse using such parameters of its measurement as structural-compositional, semantic-conceptual, communicative, allows us to identify the features of the functional role of this type of speech. The novelty of the research lies in the substantiation of how the character's inner speech (introspection), being a significant unit of composition, correlates with prospection and retrospection of the text, acting as the main form of narration. The article elicits four basic concepts that organize the content of the character's inner speech. The authors of the article offer a close analysis of the rheme-theme correlation of the title of the novel and the main text as the basis of the author’s literary discourse. Particular attention is paid to the modality of the character's inner speech from the point of view of the pragmatic orientation of this type of speech towards the addressee-reader and discourse markers that influence the process of discourse interpretation.

Keywords

• linguistic personality of a character
• verbalized inner speech of a character
• discursive markers
• concept
• great butler
• kazuo ishiguro