Mind Reading

In this book literary interior monologue is considered in relation to extraliterary phenomena, as well as narrative theory. The central question posed by this study is: what makes a particular interior monologue "believable," given the unobservable nature of human thought? The discussion revolves around the unobservable counterpart of literary interior monologue, i.e., what is known in psychology as inner speech. Taking various experimental findings and theories from Soviet and American research on inner speech, the author compares them with literary interior monologue and tries to account for similarities and differences. Examples of literary interior monologue are analyzed in comparison with data from the linguistic study of real oral spontaneous discourse (also known as "face-to-face communication"). In the context of this interdisciplinary framework four examples of literary interior monologue are considered: V. M. Garshin's "Four Days" (1877), E.