Bilgewater: Speech & thought presentation

This is clearly speech, but it is interesting to note that we don't actually know who the speaker is. It is one of the interviewers, but we don't know who. Jane Gardam seems to be giving us a sense of the knowledge-base of the candidate - and, given the stressful situation, we are likely to infer that she may have forgotten the names of at least some of the people introduced to her at the beginning of the second interview.

This looks like the answer to S22 (cf. our comments on S23-S29 below).

This is a representation of what Miss Bex (presumably one of the candidate's teachers or acquaintances) said. But it is important to notice that in the context of S36 it is effectively a presentation of the candidate remembering (= thinking about) what Miss Bex said to her before she came to Cambridge for the interview. So the speech presentation is actually embedded inside the thought presentation context which is set up by S 36.

This is a representation of what the Principal says to the candidate at the end of the interview.

Don't be too worried if you were unsure about this sentence, or didn't spot it. It is actually an example of something we have not covered so far in our work on speech an d thought presentation. The sentence looks a bit ambiguous. It is difficult to know whether it is a bit of narration from the candidate's viewpoint or a presentation of what the candidate was thinking. We will examine it further in Task E.

These examples are all rather similar, note.

Much of this passage seems ambiguous in the same way that S1 is. Though it may be that you might come to different decisions about whether particular parts of this stretch are character-viewpoint marked narration or thought presentation, depending on particular inferences you make as you read.

This stretch looks at first sight like speech. It comes immediately after the spoken question in S22 above. But the content makes it a very unlikely candidate for a candidate's spoken turn in an interview for a university place, and so we infer that it is what the candidate rebelliously thinks to herself (very quickly, presumably) in between the question in S22 and her spoken response in S30 (see speech presentation examples above).

This appears to be the I-character thinking during the interview rather than the I-narrator, making some sort of direct address to the reader.

Again, this seems to be the I-character thinking during the interview.

Note that this little bit of presentation of the candidate's thought comes in the middle of the presentation of the Principal's speech (S51-S52, and S54-S56).

More thoughts of the candidate, after the interview.

Yet more thoughts of the candidate after the interview. The prologue to the novel thus ends with the candidate wondering whether or not to take up a place at the university she seems so ambivalent about.

If our suggestions above are correct, of the 71 sentences (562 words) in the passage 9 sentences (79 words) are speech presentation and 46 sentences (and a further two halves of two more sentences), or 301 words, are thought presentation. So around two thirds of the passage is discourse presentation. You may think at first sight that this is not surprising, given that three interviews are described. But actually rather a small number of sentences involve the presentation of speech. Instead, a very large number involve thought presentation.

Another thing to note is that the speech presented is shared between four different characters (the candidate is only presented as uttering two sentences - a total of 17 words), whereas the thoughts presented all belong to the candidate. Prototypically we expect candidates to talk a lot in interviews, because it is in the interests of the interviewers that they do so. It is why they ask them questions, after all. But this interview experience is presented mainly through the thoughts of the candidate, and there are even two cases where the candidate's thoughts are depicted as coming in the middle of talk, leading us to infer that she is thinking very fast about all sorts of things (including what old Miss Bex said to her) while others talk to her. This juxtaposition of outer (speech) and inner (thought) perspectives is another way in which the hyper-aware nature of the candidate is instantiated in the passage.