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Varieties of speech presentation in the novel
Task D - John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
The following extract is from John Le Carré's well-know novel
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Although he is a writer of spy fiction,
Le Carré is a master of point of view manipulation, and is arguably
a much greater novelist than he has so far been given credit for. In this
novel, the spymaster, George Smiley is trying to discover the identity
of a KGB mole within the British secret service, MI6. What he is told
below is actually the crucial piece of information which eventually helps
Smiley, an introspective character who keeps things to himself, to solve
the puzzle and remove the 'mole' from MI6 . The other person is another,
lower-level member of MI6, called Gerry Westerby. Gerry, a rather bluff,
gung-ho fellow is telling what he has heard about an incident in which
another British secret agent in Czechoslovakia was unexpectedly caught
in a forest, tortured and imprisoned. We discover, by inference, that
the Russians must have known where he would be in advance (and so discovering
who could have told them will solve the conundrum):
"So that was the first part of the story.(1) Czech troops out,
Russian troops in.(2) Got it?"(3)
Smiley said yes, he thought he had his mind round it so far.(4)
(John Le Carre  ,
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy)
(1) What speech presentation modes are used for
the speech of the two different characters?
(2) Why do you think they are given different presentational forms?
Our answer
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