5.1 Free Direct Speech
“Free direct speech is a form with minimal narrative intervention and the closest narrative distance.”(Shen,156)Free direct speech is a dialogue or inner monologue of characters without quotation marks.Itsgrammatical feature is to remove the leading words and quotation marks.The narrative feature is to erasethe narrator’s voice and present the original speech of the characters themselves.As an ideal discoursemode to express the character’s conscious activities,free direct speech can flexibly and freely express the character’s endless ramble and complicated inner world.Therefore,it is favored by modern writers.
In A Mercy,Morrison uses free direct speech to present Florens’inner monologue,showing thechange of her inner world,which is also the reconstruction process of her self-consciousness andidentity.Free direct speech is rather flexible and free in the expression of the character’s consciousactivities.Without pressure of narrative context and the shackles of leading words and quotation marks,free direct speech can show Florens’conscious activities more flexibly.Nearly half of the chapters in thenovel are composed of Florens’free direct speech,which are Florens’inner monologue to the blacksmith,enabling readers to further feel the growth of the character.
Chapter Six Conclusion
As an African-American female writer,Morrison pays close attention to the survival and plight ofblack women.Most of her novels portray the pathetic and tragic fate of black women from a uniqueperspective,and also explore the way out of black women.Compared with Morrison’s previous works,AMercy not only reveals the trauma and misery that slavery has inflicted on women of different colors,butalso further reveals the nature of enslavement,which is not external or physical,but internal.It is thisspiritual willingness of enslavement that makes them truly slaves.By using feminist narratology to analyzethe narrative techniques of A Mercy,this thesis discusses how Morrison successfully participated in theconstruction of discourse authority by using these narrative techniques,so as to successfully convey femaleconsciousness,reconstruct female identity and realize the construction of female authority.
To begin with,this thesis analyzes the narrative voice in the novel.Morrison adopts three narrativevoices:personal voice,authorial voice and communal voice.Through the personal voice and communalvoice,Morrison gives the female characters the opportunity to narrate their own stories.Only when womenhave the right to speak can they have the opportunity to express their female experience and convey theirfemale consciousness.Personal voice endows Florens with the right to speak and takes men as objects,which undoubtedly challenges the authority of male discourse in the patriarchal society and reflects thatFlorens got rid of the shackles of spiritual enslavement and realized the salvation of her soul throughwriting.Communal narrative voice gives Florence’s mother the opportunity to tell the tragic experiences ofthem and their marginal position of being“silent”.The sense of reality and vividness brought by suchfirst-person narration can better arouse readers’sympathy for these women,thus helping the author toconstruct discourse authority.The authorial voice allows the narrator to participate in the construction ofdiscourse authority under the gender mask.The narrator in authorial voice shows the process of womenbeing forced to become“the other”and“the second sex”in the patriarchal society.By dispelling the voiceof the male characters,the narrator further establishes the narrative authority of the femalecharacters.Through the use of different narrative voices,Morrison succeeds in promoting femaleconsciousness and subverting male discourse authority and thereby contributing to female discourseauthority.
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