3. Types of narration and compositional forms.

While reading the text, we may identify various views with various characters, not attributing them directly to the writer. The latter’s views and emotions are most explicitly expressed in the author’s speech (the author’s narrative). The unfolding of the plot is mainly concentrated here, the time and place of action are also described here, as the author sees them. The author’s narrative supplies the reader with direct information about the author’s preferences and objections, beliefs and contradictions.

The writer himself hides behind the figure of the narrator, presents all the events of the story from the latter’s viewpoint and only sporadically emerges in the narrative with his own considerations, which may reinforce or contradict those expressed by the narrator. This form of author’s speech is called entrusted narrative. The structure of the entrusted narrative is much more complicated than that of the author’s narrative proper, because instead of one commanding, organizing image of the author, we have the hierarchy of the narrator’s image seemingly arranging the pros and cons of the related problem.

Entrusted narrative can be carried out in the 1st person singular, when the narrator proceeds with his story openly and explicitly, from his own name, as in “The catcher in the rye”.

Entrusted narrative may be anonymous. The narrator does not openly claim responsibility for the views and evaluations but the manner of presentation, the angle of description very strongly suggest that the story is told not by the author himself (e.g. E.Hemingway).

A very important place is occupied by dialogue, where characters express their minds in the form of uttered speech. In their exchange of remarks the participants of the dialogue, while discussing other people and their actions, expose themselves too. So, dialogue is one of the most significant forms of the personage’s self-characteristics.

Interior speech of the personage allows the author to peep into the inner world of the character, to observe his ideas and views in the making. Interior speech is best known in the form of interior monologue, a rather lengthy piece of the text dealing with one major topic of the character’s thinking, offering causes for his past, present and future actions. Short in-sets of interior speech presents immediate mental and emotional reactions of the personage to the remark or action of other characters.

In extreme cases the desire to be understood by others is outshadowed by the author’s effort to portray the disjointed, purely associative manner of thinking, which makes interior speech almost or completely incomprehensible. It is called stream-of-consciousness technique which is especially popular with representatives of modernism in contemporary literature.

So the personage’s viewpoint can be realized in the uttered (dialogue) and inner (interior) speech forms. Both are introduced into the text by the author’s remarks containing indication of the personage and of the act of speaking expressed by such verbs as to say, to think.

The last type of narration observed in artistic prose is a peculiar blend of the viewpoints and language spheres of both the author and the character. It is represented (reported) speech. Represented speech serves to show either the mental reproduction of a once uttered remark, or the character’s thinking. The first case is known as represented uttered speech, the second one as represented inner speech. The latter is close to the personage’s interior speech in essence, but differ from it in form: it is rendered in the third person singular and may have the author’s qualitative words. Interior speech belongs to the personage completely, formally too, which is materialized through the first-person pronouns and the language idiosyncrasies of the character.

We shall deal with the three narrative compositional forms traditionally singled out in poetics and stylistics. They are: narrative proper where the unfolding of the plot is concentrated. This is the most dynamic compositional form of the text. Two other forms – description and argumentation – are static.

4. Syntactic stylistic devices.

Syntactic stylistic devices add logical, emotive, expressive information to the utterance regardless of lexical meanings of sentence components.

Antithesis is a good example of them: syntactically, antithesis is just another case of parallel constructions. But unlike parallelism, which is indifferent to the semantics of its components, the two parts of an antithesis must be semantically opposite to each other: e.g. O.Wild “Some people have much to live on and little to live for”, where “much” and “little” present a pair of antonyms, supported by the contextual opposition of postpositions “on” and “for”. The main function of antithesis is to stress the heterogeneity of the described phenomenon, to show that the latter is a dialectal unity of two (or more) opposing features.

Another type of syntactic stylistic devices is climax, in which each next word combination is logically more important or emotionally stronger and more explicit: “Better to borrow, better to beg, better to die”. In climax we deal with strings if synonyms or at least semantically related words belonging to the same thematic group. It is possible to speak of logical, emotive or quantitative types of climax. The most widely spread model of climax is a three-step construction, in which intensification of logical importance, of emotion or quantity (size, dimension) is gradually rising step by step. In emotive climax we rather often meet a two-step structure, in which the second part repeats the first one and is further strengthened by an intensifier, as in the following example: “He was so helpless, so very helpless”.

Climax suddenly interrupted by an unexpected turn of the thought which defeats expectations of the reader and ends in complete semantic reversal of the emphasized idea, is called anticlimax. To stress the abruptness of the change emphatic punctuation (dash) is used between the ascending and the descending parts of the anticlimax.

Simile is an imaginative comparison of two unlike objects belonging to two different classes. The one which is compared is called the tenor, the one with which it is compared is called the vehicle. The tenor and the vehicle form the two semantic poles of the simile, which are connected by one of the following link words: like, as, as like, such as, as…as. In simple comparison objects belonging to the same class, while in simile we deal with the likening of objects belonging to different classes. So, “She is like her mother” is a simple comparison, used to state an evident fact. “She is like a rose” is a simile used for purpose of expressive evaluation, emotive explanation, highly individual description. In a simile two objects are compared on the grounds of similarity of some quality. This feature which is called foundation of a simile, may be explicitly mentioned in an example: “His muscles are hard as rock”. A simile, often repeated, becomes trite and adds to the stock of language phraseology. Similes in which the link between the tenor and the vehicle is expressed by notional verbs: to resemble, to seem, to remember, are called disguised.

Litotes is a two-component structure in which two negations are joined to give a positive evaluation. Thus “not unkindly” means “kindly”, though the positive effect is weakened and some lack of the speaker’s confidence in a statement is implied. The first part of the litotes is always the negative particle “not”, while the second varies in form from a negatively affixed word to a negative phrase. The uniqueness of litotes lies in its specific “double negative” structure and in its weakening only the positive evaluation. “Her face was not unpretty”.

Periphrasis is a very peculiar stylistic device which basically consists of using a roundabout form of expression instead of a simpler one, i.e. of using a more or less complicated syntactical structure instead of a word. Depending on the mechanisms of this substitution, periphrases are classified into figurative and logical. “The hospital was crowded with the surgically interesting products of the fighting in Africa” (figurative). “Mr. Du Pount was dressed in the conventional disguise (suit)” (logical). The main function of periphrases is to convey a purely individual perception of the described object. The often repeated periphrases become trite and serves as universally accepted periphrastic synonyms “the gentle/soft/weak sex” (women), “my better half” (my spouse).