INNERER MONOLOG ALS FORM DER GEDANKENDARSTELLUNG IN ERZÄHLENDEN TEXTEN
INNER MONOLOGUE AS A FORM OF THOUGHT REPRESENTATION IN NARRATIVE TEXTS

Summary/Abstract: Ever since the ancient times the old scholars were concerned with the question on how to classify literary works in genres within the philological science. This was tried several times and resulted successfully in the trisection of the major genres: prose, poetry and drama. The prose, also called narrative literature, includes all possibilities of fictional narration. The fictional narration is written in verse or prose form, whereby the author mostly uses different narration techniques. Through these narrative techniques, a narrative literary text draws the reader's attention to a character. The inner monologue is one such technique that expresses the character's thoughts. The literature scientists do not fully agree on this aspect, because one group identifies the inner monologue with the stream of consciousness whereas the other group says that the inner monologue is more conscious and better formulated on the syntactic level. It is certainly not a mistake to treat the inner monologue as an equivalent to the stream of consciousness. The two are already related at some levels, which will be discussed more in the course of the research. The omniscient (all-knowing) narrator can also know what a character is thinking and usually presents these thoughts with an introduction like “she said to herself” and other similar introductions. These or similar introductions are excluded from an inner monologue, which means that the narrative i.e. the narrator's perspective remains in the background. When and in what form an inner monologue appears in a narrative text will be seen from the excerpts of some exemplary narrative texts. The focus of this research paper will be on the inner monologue and its occurrence in narrative texts.

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