A Register-Based Study of Interior Monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Abstract

While fictional orality (spoken language in fictional texts) has received some attention in the context of quantitative register studies at the interface of linguistics and literature, only a few attempts have been made so far to apply the quantitative methods of register studies to interior monologues (and other forms of inner speech or thought representation). This article presents a case study of the three main characters of James Joyce’s Ulysses whose thoughts are presented extensively in the novel, i.e., Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Making use of quantitative, corpus-based methods, the thoughts of these characters are compared to fictional direct speech and (literary and non-literary) reference texts. We show that the interior monologues of Ulysses span a range of non-narrative registers with varying degrees of informational density and involvement. The thoughts of one character, Leopold Bloom, differ substantially from that character’s speech. The relative heterogeneity across characters is taken as an indication that interior monologue is used as a means of perspective taking and implicit characterization.