Point of View: A Linguistic Analysis of Literary Style

Modern literary narratives, like modern paintings, are often represented from different viewing positions. In the case of a painting, the differing viewpoints will vary in terms of spatial position. In the case of a narrative it is possible for the various viewpoints to differ both spatially and temporally. In fact, some narratives are characterized by frequent shifts in the spatial and temporal positions from which events and descriptions are related, with certain events described simultaneously from more than one temporal and/or spatial position. The texts investigated in this study are narratives of this type, written in the literary style known as free, indirect style. The book's purpose is two-fold. From the perspective of linguistics, it seeks to analyze the discourse structure of texts with a complex temporal organization. From the perspective of literary studies, it seeks to explain certain non-linguistic aspects of the texts in terms of linguistic form. This book then, extends the domain of discourse analysis to include the language of complex literary texts and, at the same time, offers a linguistically adequate account of the relationship between linguistic form and point of view.