Thought presentation

In the first emboldened clause 'I thought;' all we know is that thought occurred, and so we have a classic case of the narrator's representation of thinking (NT). And in the rest of the sentence we have another example of NT. We know nothing more at all about what was thought, even though we are given an extended characterisation of the general manner in which Philip Marlowe, the famous private investigator, is thinking. In terms of effect, we are presented with the thoughts of the 1st-person narrator in as minimal form as possible consistent with the occurrence of thought presentation. We normally expect to get rather full presentations of the thoughts and feelings of 1st-person narrators, and one of the things which marks Chandler's presentation of Philip Marlowe is that we are very rarely told much about the details of the inner workings of his mind. As a consequence we feel close to him (because he is the narrator and because he acts throughout in a moral way) and yet strangely distanced from him (we never really understand his inner motivations for doing things and so he becomes a strangely enigmatic hero).

This is a clear example of a narrator's representation of a thought act. We know what act of thought occurred and its topic. The juxtaposition of 'inner' and 'outer' reality here, with the character thinking while doing something physical, is typical of the writings of Virginia Woolf, whose novels explore the relationships between the internal and the external. Unlike Chandler, though, her characters' thoughts can often be presented in a much fuller way than the NRTA here, and in a way that makes it ambiguous whether she is presenting thought, speech or external events. This 'merging' of inner and outer reality (unlike the mere juxtaposition we see in our example here) is a main avenue of exploration in her novels, and helps to explain why many find them difficult to understand.

This example, which comes just after the NT examples we have already examined, looks like an example of NRTA. Although the thought presentation verb is the 'default' verb 'thought', that can be used, as here, to present a specific thought rather than the generalised process of thinking. In this case, it is the specificity of the topic of the thought which helps us to conclude that this is the presentation of a specific thought act (the difference between NT and NRTA can sometimes be difficukt to decide, as this example suggets). Nonetheless, because NRTA is down at the narrator end of the scale, we still don't know very much about what Philip Marlowe is really thinking.

Here, all of the emboldened parts except the last one are Direct Thought (DT). The quotation marks signal the direct form, and the tense, other deictic signals are all appropriate to the character in the fictional world, not the narrator, looking back on the events, and telling them to us at some later time. The 'voice' is clearly Marlowe's 'inner voice', which directly 'addresses' him as he tries to work out what has happened to him. It is difficult at first to be sure whether Marlowe is literally talking to himself, or 'hearing himself think', as it were, but when the narrator tells us 'I was trying to figure the thing out subconsciously.' We know he must have been thinking, not speaking. The DT form makes the thought seem very deliberate, even though Chandler's 1st-person narrator tells us it is subconscious thought. The fact that the thoughts are presented to us in a disorderly way (cf. the way Marlowe changes his mind about how long he has been unconscious) makes it a little bit like stream-of-consciousness writing, a form not usually associated with detective stories. At the end of the passage, we presumably get DS, not DT, when he tells himself to shut up, given what he has just told us about his thought process. But even this could be DT, being part of the representation of his fractured of working out what has happened to him

It is very rare to get such a full thought presentation form in the Marlow novels (cf. what we said about the earlier extract we discussed from this novel), and it is interesting that we still know very little about Marlowe's real motivations for doing what he does, precisely because this full thought presentation form is used as he regains consciousness, rather than when he is in full command of his wits.

Here is Mary, a bit further in her walk down the Charing Cross Road compared with the earlier NRTA example we discussed from this novel. Now, though, we have an indirect thought (IT) presentation of what she thinks. 'She wished' has a clause subordinated to it, acting as the object of 'wished' and beginning with 'she had' (this clause actually has other clauses nested/embedded inside it too, but we won't go into that now). This subordinate clause spells out the propositional form of her thought. The pronouns, tense and lexis seem appropriate to the narrator, not the character, however, guaranteeing this presentational form as IT, not some more direct form of presentation. We see further into Mary's mind than in the other examples we have discussed so far. Because we know the propositional form of her thought, we know not just the topic of her thought but also what she thought about that topic.

The first, unemboldened sentence, is a clear example of NRTA. This introduces the emboldened part, which is in the free indirect thought (FIT) form. We clearly get the propositional form of her thoughts, but there is no reporting clause (the previous NRTA sentence effectively means that we don't need a 'She asked herself' clause. But it can't be DT either, because the past tense and third person pronoun for Mary are not deictically appropriate for her. That said, other deictics are (cf. the use of the demonstrative pronoun 'that'). So we have a mixture of the features we canonically associate with IT on the one hand, and DT on the other. This deictic mixture is what typically produces the FIT form.

Here, even though we are not given them in DT, Mary's thoughts, in their 'question and answer' seem fairly conscious and well thought-out. But they still feel more subconscious than a DT version (try changing the tense from past to present and the pronouns from 3rd-person to 1st-person to see what we mean), and because the FIT form is a mix of narrator-relevant and character-relevant features, it is easier for the narrator to slide from standard narration to a full form of thought presentation without readers realising how they are being manipulated.