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– morally she is honest, strong-willed;
– spiritually Matfield is shallow as she is doped by cheap literature and is given
to illusions, all her ideals are affected by the adventure stories she is
fond of.
Actions include small gestures. In Chapter 1 Matfield’s resoluteness,
decisiveness and dissatisfaction are suggested, by her gestures: “...
she flung down a
library book, … rummaged in her bag, ... said “Curse!”, then closed the bag with a
sharp snap, seized her gloves and marched them over to her coat”.
Action includes a thought, a word, a decision, an impulse, and a whole event.
For example, Matfield’s decision to have a weekend with the brigandish Golspie is an
action, her impulse to make a change in her life is
also an action. Each of these actions
characterizes a definite aspect of her personality.
2. Speech characteristics.
Speech characteristics reveal the social and intellectual standing of the
character,
his age, education and occupation, his state of mind and feelings, his attitude and
relationship with his interlocutors.
When analyzing speech characteristics, one should be alert for:
l. style markers, such as:
a) markers of official style (“I presume”, “I beg your pardon”, etc.);
b) markers of informal conversational style: contracted “forms, colloquialisms,
elliptical sentences, tag constructions (as “you know”), initiating signals (as “Well”,
“Oh”), hesitation pauses, false starts – all of which normally
occur in spontaneous
colloquial speech and often remain unnoticed, but in “fictional conversation” they may
acquire a certain function, as they create verisimilitude and may indicate some features
of the speaker’s character, his state of mind and his attitude to others;
2. markers of the emotional state of the character: emphatic inversion, the use of
emotionally colored words, the use of breaks-in-the-narrative that stand for silence
(e.g. “and I asked her if she'd rather I ... didn't get married”, “and there I stayed in the
middle of the road ... staring” – the pause lays emphasis on the words that follow the
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pause), the tailing of)” into silence which reflects deep emotions or doubt, the use of
italics, interjections; hesitation pauses and false starts if they are frequent may be a
sign of nervousness, irresoluteness or
great excitement;
3. attitudinal markers: words denoting attitudes (as “resent”, “despise”, “hate”,
“adore” etc.), intensifies (as “very”, “absolutely” etc.);
4. markers of the character’s educational level: bookish words, rough words,
slang, vulgarisms, deviations from the standard;
5. markers of regional and dialectal speech, which define the speaker as to his
origin, nationality and social standing: foreign words, local words, graphons;
6. markers of the character’s occupation: terms, jargonisms;
7. markers of the speaker’s idiolect (i.e. his individual speech peculiarities),
which serve as a means of individualization and verisimilitude.
If we turn to
Mistaken Identity,
we can see how skillfully M. Twain used speech
peculiarities as a means of characterization. The markers
of informal conversational
style (“Years ago I arrived one day ...”. “asked ... if I could have some poor little
corner somewhere», «a couple of armchairs” etc.), the markers of dialectal speech
(“dey” for “there”, “dat” for “that”, “sah” for “sir” etc., which are typical of “Black
English”), the numerous markers of the emotional state of the characters and their
attitudes to one another contribute to creating verisimilitude. The reader gets the
impression of hearing the characters and witnessing the scenes. Besides, the reader
gets all the necessary information about the characters:
their feelings, mood, and
relations with one another, their social and intellectual standing, and even their origin.
In one of his pamphlets M.Twain wrote that conversation in fiction should
“sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in
the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable
purpose, and show a relevancy,
and remain in the neighborhood, of the subject in
hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people
cannot think of anything more to say”. The story
Mistaken Identity
may well serve as
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an illustration of all the requirements that the writer sets. His characters are well-
conceived not only due to their speech characteristics, but also due to the exactness in
the choice and presentation of their actions. They are defined in full accordance with
his principle: characters should be “so clearly defined that the reader can tell
beforehand what each will do in a given emergency”.
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