GAPPING AS a STYLISTIC DEVICE Analysis of Ian Mcewan's Fiction 2019

Home , Amsterdam (novel), Atonement (novel), Stylistic device

MASARYK UNIVERSITY IN BRNO Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English language

Mgr. Eva Sedláková GAPPING AS A STYLISTIC DEVICE Analysis of Ian McEwan’s Fiction

PhD. Dissertation

Supervisor: Prof. PhDr. Ludmila Urbanová, CSc. 2019

I declare that I have worked on this dissertation independently, using only the literature listed in Sources and References.

...... Author’s Signature

The thanks that I wish to express here rightfully belongs to my supervisor, Prof. PhDr. Ludmila Urbanová, CSc., for always believing in me, even at times when I did not believe in myself.

Table of contents

Typographical conventions 6

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Chapter 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 10 2.1 Scope of research, hypotheses, research methodology 10 2.2 Introduction of the observed/analyzed phenomena 14 2.3 Characterization of the author’s style 16 2.4 Point of view/introduction of the novels’ synopses 17

Chapter 3 ELLIPSIS AND SENTENCE FRAGMENTS 20 3.1 Definition of terms 20 3.2 General classification 22 3.3 NPs, nouns, verbless structures 24 3.4 Reiterations/repetitions 28 3.5 Separation of negation as intensification of meaning 34 3.6 Ellipsis as a sign of intimacy 38 3.7 Discussion 42

Chapter 4 INTRODUCTION AND IDENTIFICATION CHAINS 44 4.1 Definition of terms 44 4.2 Gradual revealing 46 4.2.1 Minor intervals between pieces of identification 48 4.2.2 Major intervals between pieces of identification 50 4.3 Unifying elements 55 4.3.1 Unifying elements within the story 56 4.3.2 Intertextual references 59 4.4 Immediate detail summary 63 4.4.1 Summary of the character’s personal or biographical facts 63 4.4.2 Summary of the characters’ connection to the plot (or a part of it) 65 4.5 Discussion 67

Chapter 5 HYBRID QUOTATIONS AND REPORTED SPEECH 69 5.1 Definition of terms 69 5.2 Direct speech incorporated into the structure of a sentence (hybrid quotations) 72 5.2.1 Lover to lover 73 5.2.2 Employer/employee 75 5.2.3 Inner dialogue/unrealized utterances 76 5.2.4 Miscellaneous 77 5.3 Indirect speech with wording in the form which resembles direct speech (reported quotations) 80 5.3.1 Inner dialogue/unrealized utterances 80 5.3.2 Reported quotations with a direct speech speech section at the end 81 5.4 Discussion 85

Chapter 6 CONCLUSION 87

SUMMARY 95

SLOVENSKE RESUMÉ 96

SOURCES AND REFERENCES 97

Typographical conventions

The following conventions are used within the dissertation: boldface for terms upon their first mention in the text single quotes for quotations from authors

For the sake of practicality, I omit quotation marks in the excerpts from the analysed texts. They are labeled by numbers in parentheses. The particular novel and page where the given extracts appear in the original text is referred to by abbreviations of the analyzed novels’ titles and page numbers. The excerpts are visually distinguished by italics and their significant parts are also highlighted by boldface.

Used abbreviations: AT = Atonement AM = Amsterdam ST = Sweet Tooth

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

‘A universe reduced to what was said in it was tidiness indeed, almost to the point of nullity, and to compensate, every utterance was delivered at the extremity of some feeling or other, in the service of which the exclamation mark was indispensable.’ Ian McEwan

The first thing that caught my interest when I was reading novels by Ian McEwan, one of my favourite authors of fiction, was the fact that the text always had my attention unwaveringly and I could not put it down until the very last sentence. Indeed, this has been true for many books and authors of those books in my life. However, while reading McEwan, it occurred to me that there are patterns he uses repeatedly in the stylization of his texts that, although they are frequently based on the omission or reduction of explicit lexical, grammatical or even textual units, eventually they contribute to the creation of effects that help make the text special enough to keep the reader interested until the very end of the novel. To a large extent, this concerns the characters that the author created and their discourse; however, not exclusively. The basis of my hypothesis is the assumption that being able to enliven the produced text to a degree considerable enough to get and keep the readers’ attention is the ultimate goal of any writer of fiction. Enlivenment is a term I have decided to use to refer to what Prague school’s Mukařovský (1964), for instance, would call de-automatization (more on that in the following chapter) or foregrounding. In terms of this thesis, I have decided to concentrate on the stylistic patterns that involve omission (or, non-inclusion) on a lexical, grammatical or even textual level. At the same time, they are one of the features which enable the author to create prose with the potential of enlivenment. As I have said, stylization patterns that contribute to the achievement of this goal are widely observable in his characters’ discourse. It is one of the aspects I wish to place focus on, since I believe that creating a conversation between characters that resembles authentic speech is an effective tool of enlivenment of the text. There is a reason that people report having difficulty concentrating on reading a written text and finishing it, while not finding it difficult at all to watch and concentrate on a movie. Creating a discourse among the characters that resembles authentic peoples’

conversations may contribute significantly to the creation of the movie-like impression within a written text. Naturally, there is always a degree of stylization in written discourse that neither can nor is desired to be avoided; McEwan’s written prose (and discourse) is no exception. The reason is simple: while literary discourse is written and meant by the author for the reader, real conversation is not. (Hughes 2005: 49) However, there are means (or rather, as the title of the thesis postulates, stylistic devices) that help make them seem more authentic, and in general help enliven the text to a level that is sufficiently high to keep the reader interested. I would also like to demonstrate that they are an indispensable means of placing emphasis and creating tension (effects which also contribute to the achievement of the ultimate goal considerably). I have observed, selected and attempted to analyze three stylistic devices that, as I believe all have one significant feature in common which I have labelled gapping. The reason I have decided to use this term is simple: all three analyzed stylistic devices involve gaps of some kind, gaps in a wider sense of the word, meaning intervals, omissions or reductions of explicit lexical, grammatical or even textual material (a pattern that I have chosen to name textual gapping). Using such devices and patterns might seem counterproductive or even paradoxical. After all, I am talking about incomplete structures, omission of grammatically significant parts of sentences and intervals between pieces of information in the text. However, I believe that the excerpts from the novels I have selected will prove that just like in other spheres of life, ever so frequently (to put it simply), implicitness is more in stylistics as well. Generally, the stylistic devices that involve gapping actually reduce explicit lexical, grammatical or textual material. This results in an interesting, undeniable fact that the demands on the readers are indeed very high. They definitely need to have developed the ability of inference (from the context), they must be very well-read in order to decipher all intertextual references, not to mention having a good memory in order to keep track of pieces of information which are far apart from each other in the text. It also requires a lot of effort, however, it makes the text highlighted. It is another means of foregrounding, enlivenment (as has been said, more on those terms in the following chapter). I have selected three novels for the analysis, namely Amsterdam (1998), Atonement (2001) and Sweet Tooth (2012). There are several reasons I chose these three, the first one being the fact that all the stylistic devices I have attempted to analyze in the thesis

are observable in the text of all three of them to a certain extent (some more than others, some less). The second reason is the year of publication. These three novels cover a considerably wide span of time and therefore represent an extensive framework, which proves that the use of the gapping stylistic devices by the author (although there is no way of knowing if it is conscious or not) is not random but rather a feature of his style. The third reason might be insignificant from the aspect of analysis, but it is one of the reasons indeed - these three novels are my favourite ones out of Ian McEwan’s works of fiction. Allow me to add a few words on the structure of the thesis at this point. It is structured into six major chapters. It begins with an introduction and it is followed by a chapter on theoretical framework which involves the presentation of the individual stylistic devices and the hypothesis, an introduction of the theoretical background as well as methodology, and a few remarks on the author’s style and the selected novels’ synopses. Chapters number 3, 4 and 5 each deal separately with all three stylistic devices and include excerpts from all three selected novels by McEwan that illustrate the application of individual stylistic devices. Each of these three chapters includes preliminary conclusions, while the final chapter presents a summary of conclusions. The sixth chapter is then followed by a list of sources and references. I have provided a summary of each novel’s plot in chapter 2, as well as a brief introduction to each excerpt in the individual chapters, therefore, appendix in the form of the novels’ text is not included. The thesis borders on both linguistics (or rather, stylistics as a branch of linguistics) and literature studies, however, I believe the two are inseparable in many ways. Jakobson, although considered wrong by Fowler (1996) about treating the language of literature as an object, also warns against poetics being separated from linguistics saying that it is ‘warranted only when the field of linguistics appears to be illicitly restricted’ (Jakobson 1960: 352). The language of literature (by Ian McEwan in particular) under the magnifying glass of stylistics analysis is the main focus of the thesis.

Chapter 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

2.1 Scope of research, hypotheses, research methodology

As a translator and an interpreter, and also a former teacher of English language, I have come across many opportunities to make a comparison between written and spoken language. It is undoubtedly clear that one of the main differences between the two lies in the degree of stylization. While spoken language is more situational, spontaneous and context-dependent, written language is produced in a process that usually involves preparation and enables additional revisions, corrections and explanations. However, it would certainly be foolish to try to define clear borderlines between physically realized speech and written language. ‘The distinction between spoken and written language is no longer clear-cut, since elements of spoken language frequently appear in writing.’ (Urbanová 2013: 99) It is not my intention to compare written and spoken language in this thesis. However, my translation/interpreting practice definitely gave me an impulse to start pondering the language of fictional discourse. Caldas-Couthard (1992) comments on the issue by claiming that it is crucial for the writer to keep hold of their readers’ interest throughout the text:

[…] text is linear, it virtually forces tidiness on written conversation. Composed or reported interactions are, therefore, cleaned-up versions of talk. Writers have to represent speech as neatly as possible in order to maintain their readers' interest in their texts. So, real talk and reported talk, although sharing basic characteristics in terms of overall organisation, seem to be quite different. (Caldas-Coulthard 1992: 70)

As I have said in the introduction, no matter how determined the author of the text may be to make it seem as close to real conversation as possible, there is inherently a certain degree of stylization in written discourse/text that cannot (and should not) be avoided, since such dialogue would look chaotic at best, written down on the page. Written discourse usually runs smoothly with far fewer interruptions than in a real conversation. ‘[…] broken-off utterance is confusing, and even annoying. […] we lose

the opportunity for the central character to give his attitude […].’ (Hughes 2005: 46) This also applies vice-versa – a real, fruitful conversation is hardly ever chaotic and after all, as Urbanová (2005: 156) says, ‘a certain degree of stylization is present in authentic, spontaneous face-to-face conversation as well, since every description and evaluation of reality is bound to be subjective.’ I have attempted to analyse the text of three selected novels by Ian McEwan. When we look at the language of their characters, it is frequently stylized in a way that appears to be aimed at achieving the effect of resembling actual authentic conversation between actual people.

The efforts to make the written discourse more cultivated, elaborate and precise are frequently backgrounded. It can be argued that stylized forms of communication are understood as unnatural, even as an exaggeration and a highly stylized, artificial way of speaking and writing. (Urbanová 2013: 100)

My hypothesis therefore involves the assumption that it is possible for the author to achieve the effect of a higher degree of authenticity or, so to speak, a higher degree of proximity to life-like feel of the fictional conversation in his characters’ discourse with the help of certain stylistic devices, thus managing to maintain the readers’ interest, as emphasized by Caldas-Coulthard (see above). As has already been mentioned in the introduction, the stylistic devices that I have chosen to analyze all involve, so to speak, the use of gaps of some sort; gap being a term I have decided to use considering its definition by the Longman English Dictionary (2004) as ‘a space between two things’, or, in this case rather ‘something that is missing that stops something else from being good or complete’. (It is important not to confuse this wider term with gapping defined as a type of ellipsis, see the chapter on ellipsis and sentence fragments). Wales (1990) offers another definition related directly to linguistics that may apply here: ‘In linguistics, gap refers to a missing value or unit in the system, be it PHONETIC, LEXICAL, SEMANTIC; an absence possible according to the rules of language.’ (Wales 1990: 184) While it is true and obvious that the devices I have attempted to observe and describe involve gapping (which, in fact, means that the lexical, grammatical or textual material that they contain is reduced), it is my aim to demonstrate that they contribute to making

the text (and discourse) more authentic and enlivened, eventually helping the author achieve the ultimate goal of maintaining the readers’ interest.

It is undoubtedly true that less explicit information also may mean more work and effort on the part of the reader (because, although the conversation may be taking place between or among the characters, it is ultimately the reader who must make sense of the discourse).

Contextually unsupported gaps or telegraphic strings of indeterminate structure are qualitatively more challenging to readers in quite specific ways. In quantitative terms, the more gaps there are in a text, […], the more its meanings will require active construction by the reader. (Wilson 2000: 129)

The part of the assumption here is that it is not the intention of the author to confuse the reader intentionally (unless it is desired for some reason) and that the author shall adhere to Leech’s Principle of Economy: ‘If one can shorten the text while keeping the message unimpaired, this reduces the amount of time and effort involved both in encoding and decoding.’ (Leech 1983: 67) Gapping/omission reduces the explicit, thus providing space for the reader to make sense of what is uttered on their own, being made to infer a given amount of information mainly with the help of the context, opening up the space for individual interpretation.

Reinforcement of the above-mentioned components of discourse is an expression of the speaker’s/reader’s involvement, i.e. his/her own engagement in shaping the discourse meaning. Points of view are shifted, the speaker switches from describing the situation in an impersonal way to one’s own subjective evaluation. (Urbanová 2013: 100)

This inevitably means that the ability of inference is vital for the reader, because, to a large extent, it is what eventually contributes to their ability to understand and derive pleasure from reading any text. My hypothesis and the theoretical framework of this

thesis also draws to an extent on the tradition of Prague school of linguistics, namely Jan Mukařovský and his Standard language and poetic language (a source that Wilson includes to a large extent as well), in which he focuses on the relationship between what he calls ‘poetic language’ and ‘standard language’. Mukařovský basically argues that certain deflections from the standard are desirable, as they are exactly what makes the text more conscious, because it thus becomes less schematized: ‘Foregrounding is the opposite of automatization, that is, the de-automatization of an act; the more an act is automatized, the less it is consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious does it become.’ (Mukařovský 1964: 44) The stylistic devices that have been applied by McEwan in the three analyzed novels arguably appear to possess the possibility to ‘de-automatize’ the text, i.e. make it stand out, or, in other words, become a tool of what is probably best characterized as enlivenment. To quote the Longman dictionary again, to enliven means ‘to make something more interesting’. As Wilson also says: ‘For Mukařovský, literary language takes the resources of everyday language, encompassed in his notion of ‘standard’, and consciously and pleasurably introduces deviations that ‘de-automatize’ text.’ (Wilson 2000: 121) The above-mentioned term, enlivenment, is a term that may well be considered synonymous with Mukařovský’s ‘de-automatization’ or ‘foregrounding’, a term defined by Verdonk (2002) as follows:

[…] in making a stylistic analysis we are not so much focused on every form and structure in a text, as on those which stand out in it. Such conspicuous elements hold a promise of stylistic relevance and thereby rouse the reader’s interest or emotions. In stylistic this psychological effect is called foregrounding […]. (Verdonk 2002: 6)

Verdonk also emphasizes the importance of rousing the reader’s interest and characterizes style as a motivated choice. Jeffries and McIntyre (2010) also mention Mukařovský when talking abot foregrounding and, more importantly, offer a distinction between two types of it: ‘[…] the foregrounded features of a text are often seen as both memorable and highly interpretable. Foregrounding is achieved by either linguistic deviation or linguistic parallelism.’ (Jeffries and McIntyre 2010: 113) In case of McEwan’s fiction,

foregrounding within his specific style is mostly achieved by deviation (see e.g. subchapters 3.4, 3.5, 4.2.2)

2.2 Introduction of the observed/analyzed phenomena

At this point, let me briefly introduce the stylistic devices that I have mentioned above. There are three of them and as has been said, they all involve gapping/omission of some sort – grammatical, lexical and one that I have chosen to label textual gapping. The first one that I have taken a look at is ellipsis, or rather (to use a term adopted from Merchant 2005) fragments which involve omission of parts of sentence structure. The most numerous category involves noun phrases and various verbless structures, but also present are reiterations along with repetitions of only certain utterance fragments (e.g. echoing), separation of negation as intensification of meaning within the sentence and remarks on ellipsis as a potential sign of intimacy. Except for being a tool of enlivenment and creating discourse that is similar to real authentic conversation, it serves as an indicator of the relationships’ intensity scale (effects that are discussed further on in the chapter). Then I have concentrated on the introduction and identification chains, by which I mean specifying the initial points of the characters’/objects’ names’ occurrence in the text and observing the way the information about these is distributed in the text and to the reader (to use Martin and Rose’s (2003) exact words, to ‘keep track of who is being talked about at any point’ (Martin and Rose 2003: 145)). How extensive a space (i.e. gap) exists in between the ‘chunks’ of this information within the text is an interesting pattern to look at – one that I have decided to label textual gapping. The gaps vary from minor (literally non-existent) ones to extremely extensive ones. The chapter also attempts to take a closer look at what works as unifying elements (characters or parts of the stories that the other characters keep referring to, thus making use of them as a tool of bringing the pieces of identification together) and intertextual references, which are of no less importance. They both help bridge the gaps between the above-mentioned pieces of information. The final subcategory deals with a pattern which is typical of Sweet Tooth, i.e. a summary of facts that immediately follow the name. This stylistic device above all appears to give the reader the opportunity to take part in shaping the meaning and identifying more easily with the characters. Most of the strategies described in this chapter can (and do) occur simultaneously.

The last stylistic device that I have observed and selected for analysis is hybrid quotations, i.e. gapping on a grammatical level, in the sense of omission of the quotation marks. They can be divided into two categories: either direct speech incorporated into the structure of a sentence which lacks quotation marks as a separating device in the text; or speech which is indirect as such, but its wording resembles direct speech up to a considerable degree. Applying these two patterns not only enables to vary the scale of smoothness (or coherence) of the text, but also becomes a helpful tool in providing the author with the possibility to decide how ‘felt’ (i.e. intrusive) he intends to be.

How these devices are used and distributed and what their use has made possible for the author to achieve is analyzed further on in the respective chapters: ellipsis and sentence fragments in chapter 3, introduction and identification in chapter 4 and hybrid quotations and reported speech in chapter 5. While the stylistic devices that I have mentioned and briefly described all involve a certain form and degree of omission (or gapping), they ultimately help achieve integration or, shall I say, a higher degree of coherence.

[…] the idea that literary discourse must make strange the normally habituated use of everyday language is a compelling one. True to its formalist origins, treatments of defamiliarization tend to focus on how the shape and structure of the literary message, its specifically linguistic properties, manifest deviations that challenge the habituated reader. As a syntactic feature of language that creates structural gaps, ellipsis has the potential to contribute to the defamiliarizing qualities of poetic texts. (Wilson 2000: 121)

Throughout the analysis of the individual examples of the above mentioned stylistic devices’ use, it has become apparent that they often possess the ability to, as Wilson says, ‘challenge the habituated reader’ – leave them with unresolved problems and pending questions and participate more actively in making sense of the story. The questions that I would like to raise (and possibly attempt to suggest an answer) are the following:

 Can the use of the described and analyzed stylistic devices that involve gapping contribute to the defamiliarization and enlivenment of the text (characters’ discourse)?  If so, how? And what functions/effects can they possibly have?

Each analyzed stylistic device is represented and demonstrated by selected excerpts from all three selected novels. It would have been impossible to include and list all occurrences of all three phenomena, so I have outlined the most intriguing analyzed examples that best illustrate the proposed hypotheses and observations.

2.3 Characterization of the author’s style

The author of the novels is endowed with psychological prowess. His stories, not to mention his characters appear to be rather complex, the opposite of black-or-white (not exclusively likable or unlikable) people, they do not act without any intentions, but rather act upon numerous reasons and instincts when making decisions. The author’s style has been discussed and praised by many (The New Yorker’s Daniel Zalewski (2009) speaks of McEwan’s ‘art of unease’, for instance). It is thought-provoking, rather complex and based on sharing (interaction). What contributes largely to the complexity and the appeal of the stories is, for example, the fact that there are multiple points of view (as mentioned by Han and Wang 2015), especially in Atonement. It helps the reader identify with the character from whose point of view is the story told; and the point of view is shifted throughout the text multiple times (see more on the issue below). McEwan manages to remain a detached, impartial narrator in his stories. Using a pattern that is observable with other authors (including Jane Austen, for instance) as well, rather than directly informing the reader about any (good or bad) qualities of a character by explicitly telling them, he allows the characters to act, speak, and, perhaps most importantly, to think. The reader not only has access to the characters’ speech, but also to their thoughts (inner dialogue), which reveals even more about their inner worlds and, at the same time, allows the reader to create the image of the characters on their own, without being dictated the information directly. Thus, so to speak, the reader experiences participation in the creation of the story (in other words, to quote Urbanová 2013 again, to ‘engage in shaping the discourse meaning’). While on the topic of McEwan’s style, there is an observation of mine as an aspiring text linguist that he is especially keen on making use of brief sentences consisting

mainly of noun phrases in his text (more on the subject in chapter 3 on ellipsis and fragments). These are generally considered popular and widely used in modern writing (not only in prose, but in various kinds of online and/or marketing texts, for instance).

Short sentences are easier to read than long sentences. All professional writers – newspaper reporters, publicists, magazine writers, copywriters – are taught to write in crisp, short, snappy sentences. Long sentences tire and puzzle your readers. By the time they have gotten to the end of a lengthy sentence, they do not remember what was at the beginning. (Bly 2005: 42)

As has been said, the author mostly uses NPs which are most convenient content- wise, they are the easiest to create puns with and they are not demanding in terms of the readers’ attention, which, as experience shows, can only be caught and kept for a very short span of time.

2.4 Point of view/Introduction of the novels’ synopses

While dealing with the subject of the author as a narrator, it might be useful to mention that the two chronologically earlier novels of his (i.e. Amsterdam (1998) and Atonement (2001)) differ from Sweet Tooth (2012) not only in the point of view of the narrative (the first two novels mentioned are told from the third point of view, while the last one is a first-person narrative), but, to a certain degree, also in the distribution ratio of the mentioned stylistic devices’ occurrence cases. They are all applied in all three novels; however, there is some variation within the subcategories of introduction and identification chains (see below). As has been said, the point of view from which the stories are told (namely the first two ones) shifts throughout their progression, which is one of the means which help the author remain inconspicuous. As for the basic outline of the plot of Amsterdam: it is a story focused on two middle- aged men, Clive Linley (a world-renowned composer) and Vernon Halliday (a journalist and the editor-in-chief of The Judge magazine) who are best friends and have a lot in common, including the woman they both used to be in love with – Molly Lane. Both men struggle in a way with their lives, facing every-day problems (especially moral dilemmas – potential publishing of scandalous photographs in Vernon’s case, and

(not) helping a woman who is being raped in Clive’s) and consequences that their decisions have on them and other characters further in the story. Their intense relationship inevitably leads even to arguing and fighting with each other. Despite their differences of opinions, they remain able to overcome their conflict and preserve their friendship till the very end. Molly, the woman who used to be both of their lover, is currently dead (the novel begins with a scene at her funeral), but she still generally operates as the factor that unites not only these two men, but also other people involved in the story. Having watched their beloved Molly deteriorate and expire in what they consider an undignified way, the two men promise each other to end the other one’s life before they reach such state. The story then inevitably culminates in both of their suicide, or, more fittingly, a mutual murder.

Atonement is a story that may be the best-known out of the three novels (there even has been a successful film adaptation in 2007, directed by Joe Wright), thus the plot need not be introduced in too much detail. It is a tragic love story between two young people from different social backgrounds. Cecilia Tallis is a girl from a rich family, and Robbie Turner is the son of the Tallis family’s cleaning lady. Their relationship has only just begun when Cecilia’s younger sister Briony ruins it by falsely accusing Robbie of raping their young cousin Lola, which results in his imprisonment. Cecilia and Robbie are thus torn apart at that point, never to be reunited. The war begins and they both spend their remaining years until their tragic deaths within it (Robbie as a soldier, Cecilia as a nurse). Briony, the cause of their tragedy, spends the years to come trying to atone for her crime.

Sweet Tooth focuses on a woman named Serena Frome who tells her life’s story since her early school years and first love stories. She reminisces over how she met one of her lovers, a university professor Tony Canning, who ended up recruiting her for the British secret service. One of her first important assignments on the job involved tracking down a certain Tom Haley, a promising young author, and, under the disguise of a literary agent, persuading him to write for them, thus contributing to disseminating the communist propaganda. Haley agrees and, since Serena is a beautiful young woman, the two inevitably fall for each other. Haley ends up discovering her secret, and surprisingly enough, the novels does not end with a breakup of the couple, but rather the contrary – Tom Haley’s marriage proposal.

As has been mentioned above, while two of the stylistic devices (ellipsis/fragments and hybrid quotations) occur more or less evenly within the text of the novels, there is a subcategory of the third one (identification chains) that occurs almost exclusively in Sweet Tooth: the immediate detail summary. This may be related to the fact that the novel is written from the first person point of view. It has autobiographical features which provide space for the reminiscing character (Serena) to gather significant details about people in her life together in a single ‘chunk’ in one place within the text.

Before proceeding to the analysis of the individual phenomena, I would like to emphasize that in no way am I suggesting I can tell for certain what the author had in mind or meant to achieve by applying the patterns that I have attempted to describe and analyze. I am but an avid reader with an obvious passion for literature in general and McEwan’s novels in particular. My efforts in describing some of his stylistic patterns/devices in fiction writing stem largely from my own subjective experience as a reader and the impressions and the impact that Ian McEwan’s texts have had on me.

Chapter 3 ELLIPSIS and SENTENCE FRAGMENTS

3.1 Definition of terms

The first stylistic devices to analyze in the novels are ellipsis and sentence fragments. Before proceeding, it should perhaps be emphasized that the author is very good at involving the reader in the story as actively as possible by letting the characters explicitly express themselves only to a certain degree, leaving the rest to only get revealed gradually or to be inferred. McEwan’s characters are often very brief and of few words, but on the other hand, sometimes they overflow with speech. As has already been mentioned in the subchapter on the author’s style, if we were looking for a characteristic trait of the characters’ discourse in the novel, we would find out that it often includes short utterances or comments which drop ‘one or more words in a sentence, which would be needed to complete the grammatical construction or to fully express the sense.’ (Fowler 1996: 253) They are, in fact, fragments of the Subject-Verb- Object structure, but that does not necessarily mean that they are not understandable.

A conversation consisting entirely of grammatically complete text-sentences would generally be unacceptable as a text; and it is part of the language- competence of a speaker of the language (if not of his linguistic competence in the narrower sense) that he should be able to produce grammatically incomplete, but contextually appropriate and interpretable, sentence fragments. (Lyons 1977: 589)

Some cases of omission of sentence structure parts cannot exactly be defined as ellipsis (there are, after all, types of sentences which only consist of one or two constituents). I am therefore adopting Merchant’s (2005) term ‘fragments’ which entails structures with no linguistic antecedent (Merchant 2005: 1).

Ellipsis can be defined and classified in various ways. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistics defines it as ‘sentences containing gaps that are interpreted under identity to some other constituent, not necessarily in the same sentence’ (2003:

513) and categorizes it into surface structure ellipsis (which can be embedded) and gapping (which can only occur in coordinate structures). It is also useful to mention Halliday and Mathiessen’s (2004) categorization into anaphoric and, more significantly, exophoric ellipsis:

In this type of ellipsis the clause is not presupposing anything from what has gone before, but simply taking advantage of the rhetorical structure of the situation, specifically the roles of the speaker and listener. […] Such clauses have, in fact, a thematic structure; but it consists of Rheme only. The Theme is (part of) what is omitted in the ellipsis. (Halliday and Mathiessen 2004: 111)

Swan’s Practical English usage (2003) textbook has proven to be helpful in categorizing ellipsis depending on which part of the sentence is omitted.

My hypothesis, as has already been mentioned in the second chapter, is based on the assumption that spoken and written language (as Halliday says in his Spoken and Written Language (1989)) are organized differently, as well as the discourse amongst various fictional characters varies, especially in the degree of stylization. Fictional discourse, therefore, could be expected to employ the device of ellipsis and fragmenting only infrequently, however, McEwan’s characters include them to an extensive amount. Bearing Leech’s Economy Principle in mind, part of the hypothesis is the claim that this strategy is not counterproductive, such richness in ellipsis does not affect the meaning, or, the understanding of the utterances among the characters in any way. It should not violate Grice’s maxim of quantity (1975). What are then be the author’s potential reasons for such speakers’ choices?

Real people’s daily conversation, of course, is commonly full of ellipsis, individuals use it frequently and are able to infer meaning from the context.

Altogether, it may be concluded that real conversation is unlikely to be promising material for literary employment, and that it must strike an observer who has an eye on the aesthetic capabilities of language as sloppy, banal and ill- organised.

(Leech and Short 2003: 131)

The assumption therefore is that although the author might not aim at a completely authentic experience, he still wants to make his characters’ conversation as close to authentic conversation as possible. To understand ellipsis correctly it is necessary to be able to recover the omitted material (usually from appropriate antecedent), as can be seen in many of the following examples from the three selected McEwan’s novels. These mostly include cases of surface ellipsis: mainly verb phrase deletion. There is no problem in understanding here at all, on the contrary, we could say it is even a matter of economy: less effort on the side of the speaker while there’s not much effort necessary on the side of the hearer. ‘The linguistically encoded logical form which is the output of the mental grammar is simply a starting point for rich inferential processes guided by the expectation that speakers will conform to certain standards of communication.’ (Wharton 2009: 9)

3.2 General classification

Most of the occurrences of ellipsis and fragments in all three novels are cases of surface structure ellipsis (mainly verb phrase deletions) but also a few examples of gapping in the narrower sense of the word can be observed (not to be confused with the term ‘gapping’ in the wider sense, as mentioned in Chapter 2). Let me present a few samples from the text of the novels to illustrate this distinction. The following excerpt is a brief exchange between Clive and Vernon about the deceased Molly and her disease in Amsterdam:

(1) ’She never knew what hit her.’ ‘When she did it was too late.’ (AM, 3)

Instead of repeating what Clive said in its entirety, Vernon logically uses just the auxiliary verb.

The cases of gapping are rare, but not non-existent. The referent is syntactically accessible. The ellipsis of this kind is frequently used in any type of communication – it reduces the effort on both sides (hearer and speaker). Another example comes from Sweet Tooth; a part of a conversation among Serena’s superordinates and herself. They are talking about Tom Haley, a potential young writer for them to support.

(2) ’ … And he’s keen to write a novel, says he has an idea for one apparently. Another thing, he doesn’t have an agent and is looking for one.’ ‘Agent?’ ‘Altogether different fish, Harry. Sells the work, does the contract, takes a cut.’ (ST, 112)

As Swan’s textbook states, in co-ordinate structures (like this one) it is not uncommon to omit parts which otherwise only would have been unnecessary repetitions (Swan 2003:172). The structure of this dialogue is probably used here to separate one portion of information from the other and emphasize the chronological sequence of the parts in both cases. In Atonement, an extensive part of the conversation happens generally among children, siblings, cousins, or, in short, more or less young people who are very close and whose choice of language towards one another is mostly informal. The following is a part of a dialogue between Leon Tallis and his sister Cecilia who are talking about dinner guests.

(3) He said to Cecilia, ‘Guess who we met on the way in.’ ‘Robbie.’ ‘I told him to join us tonight.’ ‘Leon! You didn’t!’ (AT, 52)

This is another case of surface structure ellipsis. To use only an auxiliary verb at the end of a verb phrase instead of a full verb is a common type of ellipsis, but in this case it also helps Cecilia who, having experienced an awkward moment with Robbie earlier that day, expresses her disbelief, or rather, her desperate wish for Leon to just be kidding. While on Atonement, let us look at an excerpt from an introductory dialogue between Cecilia and Leon’s friend Paul Marshall which represents the rarer cases of gapping (a type of ellipsis, defined and exemplified as such by multiple authors, e.g. Romero 2003: 264).

(4) Paul Marshall shook her hand and made a faint bow. There was something comically brooding about his face. His opener was conventionally dull. ‘I’ve heard an awful lot about you.’ ‘And me you.’ (AT, 47)

Cecilia only chooses and utters the subject and the object of the sentence, the most important parts of the structure. Note that this particular conversation is not exactly informal, since Marshall and Cecilia have just met for the first time, yet she not only omits the verb phrase as well as the noun phrase, she also swaps the conventional pronoun ‘I’ to ‘me’, undoubtedly to avoid redundancy consisting in unnecessary repetition and, perhaps, in order to set a friendlier tone in their conversation (showing involvement). McEwan’s characters’ speech, of course, contains countless cases of ellipsis and to analyze each and every one of them would be unnecessary, not to mention almost impossible. Let us have a look at the ones that are in any way interesting, and attempt to distribute them in categories.

3.3 NPs, nouns, verbless structures and other fragments

In general, McEwan has a predilection for very brief sentences, or, to be more precise, the vast majority of them are sentences consisting merely of nouns or noun phrases (or, occasionally, other types of phrases), plus several cases of dropping the subject (see my remarks on the author’s style in 2.3). This strategy helps him achieve certain

timelessness, eternal truth and credibility. ‘The loss of the verbal element of a clause has the effect of placing the remaining words outside any normal time-frame and results in a kind of timelessness which can be exploited in a range of ways.’ (Jeffries and McIntyre 2010: 177-8) The nominal elements also reflect the lasting nature of the communicated meaning, while the verbal elements sound more ephemeral. Weber (1992), however, stresses that nominalization is not a tool of confusing the reader: ‘[…] an utterance which contains a passive or nominalized structure only has a meaning-in- context’ (Weber 1992: 23). Let us start by looking at the examples of the above-mentioned fragments in Amsterdam. The following is a conversation between two men who know of each other by reputation, but have never formally met before and this is their first time talking to each other. Clive Linley is talking to Julian Garmony (the Foreign Secretary) at Molly’s funeral. Garmony is Molly’s former lover (just like Clive and Vernon), so it is not surprising that Clive does not find the conversation (or Garmony’s personality) pleasant at all. Garmony tells Clive (who is a famous composer) that his wife knows a few of his piano works by heart, to which Clive replies that she must indeed be good.

(5) Garmony was looking around now, securing his audience. ‘She was brilliant. Goldsmith’s, then Guildhall. A fabulous career ahead of her… ‘He paused for a comic effect. ‘Then she met me and chose medicine.’ (AM, 14)

Garmony uses no predicates when mentioning his wife’s musical achievements. Each of his utterances only contains a subject: ‘Goldsmith’s’ and ‘Guildhall’ can be traced to no syntactic antecedent, but both are places very well-known. To drop (not only) the verb phrase but also other parts of the full sentence here undoubtedly means that the Foreign Secretary wanted to stress his wife’s playing brilliance and then impress Clive even further in the same manner by dropping the verb phrase also from the following sentence. Goldsmith’s, Guildhall and fabulous career are the bombs that he is throwing on him with no need of further specification (such as verb phrase would contain). Swan’s textbook includes an ellipsis category of well-known names (2003: 184), the last words of which are often dropped. In this case they correspond to what Garmony omits when he mentions the institutions that represent his wife’s musical achievements.

They could be listed in McShane’s (2005) category of semantic ellipsis, ‘the non- expression of information that, although syntactically not required, is necessary for a full semantic representation of the sentence.’ (McShane 2005: 25), which could make it possible to classify this particular excerpt as actual ellipsis, not a fragment. There is another effect that the author’s tendency to nominalize results in that cannot be neglected: nouns and noun phrases, functioning as complete sentences, are far less tempting to be doubted than sentences in the form of full grammatical structure. ‘As a result of the ‘normal’ structure of English clauses, nominals are less susceptible to debate or questioning than other clausal elements, particularly the verbal element.’ (Jeffries 2010: 22) It is observable in the above example as well as in the following one: Molly’s husband George offers Vernon and his magazine scandalous photographs of Julian Garmony, the Foreign Secretary. They are about to be published in the magazine and one of Vernon’s subordinates, Frank, is looking at them in disbelief.

(6) But three days later, when Vernon was beginning to run the corridors, startled by the frenzy opposition and starting – but just slightly – to waver, he returned with Dibben to the same pub, to exactly the same booth, and showed him the photographs. Frank gazed at each one at length, without comment, simply shaking his head. Then he put them back in the envelope and said quietly, ’Incredible. The hypocrisy of the man.’ (AM, 107)

Frank practically only uses an NP and a mere adjective here, which signifies detachment. It could be said that what Frank says here is almost close to an interjection – it conveniently expresses his irritation with the Foreign Secretary. That and the supposed feeling of frustration is why Frank limits himself to a fragment, or, a very brief verbless comment. The hypocrisy itself is a very negative word and also a very strong one to use when talking about a person’s character. As we can see, the negative part of the utterance is separated from the rest (more on the separation of negation below). It seems the author lets Frank drop the less informative parts and use nothing else but the negative NP. Again, in order to emphasize how strongly he feels. There is

no VP, which makes the utterance sound like a given fact, not up for discussion or questioning. Expressing disbelief in a negative sense of the word through noun phrases is not rare in Sweet Tooth either. Let me mention a section where Serena and her friend Shirley are assigned a job by the Secret Service and are supposed to go undercover and clean a home at a certain address:

(7) We were dismissed and when we were out of the building, heading along Curzon Street, it was Shirley, not me, who was scathing. ‘Our cover,’ she kept saying in a loud whisper. ‘Our bloody cover. Cleaning ladies pretending to be cleaning ladies!’ (ST, 89)

The use of the NP supposed to express angry disbelief at the situation is extremely similar to the above-mentioned one from Amsterdam, the word being similar to an interjection. It also involves gradation of meaning, achieved by the repetition. The negativity of the utterance is enforced by the adjective bloody. Note that the main verb is missing from the next sentence as well. If we were looking for an example from Atonement, there would, of course, be many. Let me mention the above section of the dialogue in which Cecilia and Paul Marshall are getting introduced ((4) […] ‘And me you.’), although it is not one of the typical ones – the characteristic NP that the author uses would be in the form of a modified noun, such as Adj + N. Moreover, it lacks any modification of the NP. However, the less typical examples of verbless structures are not any less interesting. The following one is an exchange from Sweet Tooth between Serena and her colleague, Max, whom she was after to no avail. He then realized after a long time how much he cared for her, but, alas, she was not interested anymore, as she was in love with another man.

(8) He picked up the chair and sat heavily. ‘Is this to punish me?’ ‘I like him.’ ‘So unprofessional.’ ‘Oh, come on. We both know what goes on.’

(ST, 252)

This is a verbless structure that does not contain any nouns, only an adjective phrase wherein the adjective (‘unprofessional’) is modified. It is also another example of exophoric ellipsis: what is missing is the noun or the NP that would have specified what exactly Max considers ‘so unprofessional’. To use an elided structure here is quite convenient from the speaker’s (Max’s) point of view. It is not clear whether he means it is Serena’s behavior he considers unprofessional, or Serena herself. It may, after all, be both, and her answer perhaps implies so as well.

3.4 Reiterations/repetitions

As stated above, the majority of ellipsis cases in McEwan’s novels consists of surface structure ellipsis and is frequently a way of expressing oneself without unnecessary repetitions (Swan 2003: 172). It is undoubtedly true that these help the text avoid being tiresome, tedious and seemingly interminable, or, much longer than the reader can absorb or concentrate on. That, however, brings us to another category, which includes ellipsis/fragments and repetitions of utterances, or rather, reiterations in ellided or fragmented forms. A subcategory of repetitions within the domain of fragments and ellipsis may seem paradoxical at first. However, the excerpts analyzed here involve reiterations or repetitions of only certain parts of the previous utterances; thus they constitute fragments, in fact. As opposed to what could be considered unnecessary and monotonous, these appear to have a different purpose, or rather two purposes: the first one is to emphasize the part that is repeated while omitting the rest of the sentence structure.

Giving logical emphasis to the utterance is really very important in case of repetition. While repeating certain words, phrases or sentences, a writer reminds readers of their importance, making them key words, phrases or sentences of the text. Notwithstanding this fact, when a word or a phrase is repeated not for logical emphasis but simply to show a speaker’s emotional state, repetition should also be considered as a stylistic device.

(Kemertelidze and Manjavidze 2013: 3)

The second purpose is to create effective cohesive ties. After all, ‘repetition and the use of synonyms or antonyms are some of the lexical possibilities to create cohesive links, and the number that could illustrate such cohesive links is endless.’ (Mahlberg 2009: 108).

The category of repetitions and reiterations is very extensive and could easily be expanded into a separate chapter; however, let us take a look only at the relevant examples that are the most interesting ones. Many of the cases could be characterized as so called echo questions which ‘partly or fully repeat previous utterances’ (Schirm 2009: 149).

The first one comes from Sweet Tooth’s conversation between Serena and her superordinate, Harry Tapp. He has a task for her to establish contact with Tom Haley as a promising young author under the pretense of offering him a writing job.

(9) I felt obliged to make some form of intelligent objection. ‘Won’t I be like your Mr X, popping up with a chequebook? He might run at the sight of me.’ ‘At the sight of you? I rather doubt it, my dear.’ (ST, 109)

When Serena raises her objection, Tapp repeats what she said as a reaction, only substituting the pronoun respectively. Obviously he does not do this for the sake of brevity, as the second part of his utterance is wordy enough; he uses the modifier rather and also adds ‘my dear’, which can hardly be characterized as necessary (or appropriate) in a conversation with a subordinate; it even suggests lack of respect. Tapp violates the maxim of quantity here, but he does so consciously and intentionally. The effect of ellipsis here (magnified by the fact that it is an exact repetition of what Serena said before) is therefore to emphasize: in this case how beautiful she is and how stupid the idea of the writer running is, as well as to express Tapp’s surprise over Serena’s lack of self-confidence in the matter.

The following example differs from the other ones in the aspect of the point of view – it is the same character that repeats what they have said, therefore it is not a reiteration

It comes from Serena’s and Tom Haley’s first meeting in Sweet Tooth when, in disguise, she is trying to win him as a writer for MI5:

(10) ‘I don’t want to waste your time. We take advice from very good, very expert people. They’ve given a lot of thoughts to this. They like your journalism, and they love your stories. Really love them. The hope is…’ (ST, 165)

At first, Serena drops nothing from her clauses, not even the subject which she repeats (‘They like your journalism and they love your stories’), although it is the same for both and elsewhere it may have been unnecessary (a violation of the quantity maxim), therefore, under other circumstances it should have been omitted. Serena is nervous in this situation, which may also have an effect on her way of expression. According to the conclusions by Kurtz and Wilbur, ‘the use of repetitions as the default response may indicate that the principle of providing enough information is stronger than of not providing too much.’ (2011: 26) Serena’s earnest attempt to look as confident and trustworthy as possible may have a connection to how she formulates her utterances. It is also necessary to note that she only omits the subject in her next sentence while insistently repeating the word love. This enables her to gradate the tension until the point of the grand revelation, or, to proceed gradually from the good through even better up to the best (‘Really love them.’) At that point, she finally omits the unnecessary so that the impact of the words that remain becomes even greater. A similar situation in Sweet Tooth occurs when Max talks to Serena about the background of her admission to the MI5:

(11) ’The women in your section, Belinda, Anne, Hillary, Wendy and the rest. Ever ask them what kind of degrees they got?’ ‘No.’ ‘Pity. Firsts, starred firsts, double firsts, you name it. Classics, History, English.’ ‘Clever them.’

‘Even your friend Shirley got one.’ ‘Even?’ ‘Ever wonder why they let you in with a third. In maths?’ He waited but I didn’t reply. (ST, 253-4)

Serena’s reiteration ‘Even?’ here, on the other hand, is not a tool of expressing surprise or making sure she understood correctly (in that case she would probably choose a different word, e.g. Shirley). It does not violate the maxim of quantity but rather serves a different purpose - it is an effective cohesive tie, plus undoubtedly meant to be sarcastic, while at the same time emphasizing again. She either wants to ridicule Max, belittle his revelation and emphasize sarcastically how unimportant it all seems to her, or (more likely), she wants to expres show offended she feels by his emphasis on the fact that everybody did bettter than she did. Her ‘Even?’ is therefore more of a reply than a question. Max and Serena’s conversations contain many examples of this kind. The following one comes from the same one as above and includes Max’s confession about his feelings for Serena:

(12) Despite that I said, ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘I’ve had to break off my engagement.’ ‘Had to?’ ‘You made your own feelings clear when I told you about it.’ (ST, 250)

This part of the dialogue is in a way similar to the previous one. Again, Serena repeats a part of what Max said and she neither wants to make sure she did not misunderstood nor wants humiliate him this time, but rather feels the need to challenge the truth value of what he said and to express her disbelief and emphasize the part she believes is untrue. She is convinced Max never loved her or wanted her, so the thought of him being forced to break off his engagement to another woman (which, as he insinuates, was somehow caused by Serena herself) seems ridiculous as well as

alarming to her and immediately provokes a shocked response. It is therefore not redundant and serves more as a cohesive tie. Let us have a look at examples from Amsterdam. The first one occurs when George Lane, Molly’s husband, formally introduces to Clive a poet from USA, Hart Pullman.

(13) ‘And this,’ George said, ‘also from the States, is Hart Pullman.’ ‘Hart Pullman. At last. Do you remember I set your Rage poems for jazz orchestra?’ Pullman was the Beat poet, the last survivor of the Kerouac generation. He was a withered little lizard of a man who was having trouble twisting his neck to look up at Clive. (AM, 10)

Clive’s repetition of the poet’s full (!) name indicates Clive’s attempt at flattery. The name is supposedly well-known and Clive wishes to acknowledge that fact by repeating it, and emphasize the importance of it by omitting the rest of the sentence structure. The name therefore remains the only cohesive tie that connects the men’s utterances and the maxim of quantity remains unviolated. Clive and Vernon share a moment of mutual forgiveness when they realize their conflict (Clive despised Vernon for publishing scandalous photographs, Vernon despised Clive for not helping identify a suspect) was not harm enough to break off their friendship:

(14) ‘Cheers. And look, I meant what I said. I really am sorry about sending the police round to you. It was appalling behavior. Unconditional, groveling apologies.’ ‘Don’t mention it again. I’m terribly sorry about your job and all that business. You really were the best.’ ‘Let’s shake on it then. Friends.’ ‘Friends.’ (AM, 165)

The speakers both use ellipsis in this case. Vernon first says ‘Friends’, a fragment of, shall we say, a sentence like ‘Let’s remain friends’, and Clive then repeats it – a simple construction that is supposed to express they both value their relationship equally. The single word out of the entire unpronounced structure is quite enough to express what is necessary and more would have been redundant. In Atonement, the same strategy is used in similar constructions. The following comes from a dialogue between Leon Tallis (who claims that England is a completely different country in a heat wave) and his friend Paul Marshall:

(15) ’I love England in a heat wave. It’s a different country. All the rules change.’ […] Paul Marshall said, ‘Nonsense. Name a single rule that changes.’ ‘All right. At the club the only place one’s allowed to remove one’s jacket is the billiard room. But if the temperature reaches ninety degrees before three o’clock, then jackets can be taken off in the upstairs bar the following day.’ ‘The following day! A different country indeed.’ (AT, 128)

While Marshall repeats Leon’s ‘The following day’ immediately after he utters it, the gap between Leon’s and Marshall’s ‘A different country’ is considerably larger. As in the previous examples, in this case too Marshall’s reactions show his surprise in the first part of his utterance. In the following, he repeats again what Leon said and adds ‘indeed’, which functions as a cohesive tie here as well as an acknowledgement of Leon’s words – it becomes a way for Marshall to admit his friend was right and he him know that. The repeated section here is, therefore, a form of involvement of the two discourse participants in the conversation. After all, ‘repetition, dialogue, and imagery work along with other linguistic (and nonlinguistic) strategies to create involvement.’ (Tannen 2007: 25) A few pages later Robbie and Cecilia share a very intimate conversation about their developing romantic relationship.

(16) ‘… I thought that I’d be perfectly happy never seeing you or speaking to you again. I thought you’d go off to medical school and I’d be happy. I was so angry with you. I suppose it’s been a way of not thinking about it. Rather convenient really…’ She gave a tense little laugh. He said, ‘It?’ (AT, 133)

Robbie chooses to repeat Cecilia’s ‘it’, although it is only a very minor part of her utterance – in fact just the object in the form of a pronoun. By omitting everything else he manages to make ‘it’ stand out as the emphasized part, since apparently it is the one that matters most to him. His repetition of ‘it’ expresses uncertainty about what she meant as well as an indirect request to her to clarify or declare her feelings and what ‘it’ meant more eloquently.

Repetition of only certain words from the whole of a sentence structure while omitting the rest of 34 tis, as we can see, quite frequent in McEwan’s characters’ conversation. 34 tis a strategy that may serve several purposes at once. The characters can express a shock, surprise or even disbelief over what their conversation partners uttered before, and 34 tis very often the case. Further on, they become able to emphasize the particular section of the utterance that they consider important and want to elaborate on further, which implies the strategy also proves to be an effective tool of lexical cohesion, as characterized by Tanskanen (2006: 16). Furthermore, they may also be one of the tools that increase the desired impression of authenticity, since, as Aitchison (1994) claims, repetition occurs more frequently in spoken than in written language (Aitchison 1994: 18).

3.5 Separation of negation as intensification of meaning

Let me first clarify that by the term ‘negation’ I do not mean just grammatical negation, realized by ‘not’ or ‘no’, or other negative particles. Also included are words and lexical items that fit the category as decribed by Jeffries and McIntyre (2010):

[…] lexical items […] where the semantics indicate a negated denotation. […] The parameters for identifying a lexical item as negative are not clear-cut and result in items being more peripheral to the group, including for example those which have negative evaluation as a part of their meaning.’

(Jeffries and McIntyre 2010: 244)

As we have already seen above in (6), Frank Dibben’s remark (Amsterdam), instead of simply using the common structure (S-V-O), the author often reaches for the strategy of eliding some material and, at the same time separating the negative part of the utterance from the rest. ([…] ’Incredible. The hypocrisy of the man.’ (AM, 107)) Instead of just saying ‘The hypocrisy of the man is incredible’, Frank chooses to separate. Not only this type of structuration enables him to emphasize the important part of the utterance, but it is also much more expressive and creates much more tension. The word ‘incredible’ itself does not say much about what Frank’s opinion really is, it just implies he feels strongly – the fact that he is disgusted is only revealed gradually. Moving on to more interesting samples from the text of the same novel, there is a part of a conversation between Vernon, the editor of The Judge, and Molly’s husband, George, about the previously mentioned photographs of Garmony.

(17) They sat almost twenty feet apart, with the hissing fireplace between them. He had been alone for half a minute, Vernon thought, he might have crawled over to the fender and knocked the right side of his head on it. Even in company now, he did not feel right. ‘I’ve seen the ABC figures,’ George said gravely. ‘Not good.’ (AM, 52)

This omission of both the subject and the predicate could be classified as an exophoric ellipsis; George’s last utterance is purely rhematic. Although these parts of the sentence are omitted, there’s no confusion or misunderstanding or even violation of the maxim. The subject can be traced to George’s previous utterance, the predicate is omitted entirely, but that has no negative influence on the overall meaning or understanding or the maxim. What is interesting though is that except eliding, George

separates the negative part of the sentence form the rest. Obviously, he wants to stress the part that carries the negation, and thus (similarly as in the example above) create enough tension. When the fact that Vernon is a bit hesitant and (and is not especially fond of George as Molly’s husband either) is taken into consideration, it becomes evident that the main purpose of George’s choice to separate the negation from the rest of the utterance is to make Vernon realize that he really needs his help. (The scandal in question concerns the above-mentioned Foreign Secretary, Julian Garmony – when Molly died, her husband came into possession of some photographs of him that she had made and that could have compromised his career if they were ever published in a magazine like The Judge). Another example of a similar type of construction including an exophoric ellipsis comes from the above-mentioned dialogue between Clive and Julian Garmony. The Foreign Secretary congratulates Clive on his commission for the Millennial Symphony and in return, Clive thanks him for voting for him:

(18) ‘Some of my colleagues wanted this pop star chap, the ex-Beatle. Anyway, how is it coming along. Almost done?’ ‘Almost.’ (AM, 14)

The Foreign Secretary’s question is already elliptical; Clive’s answer contains even less linguistic material. This example shows another verb phrase deletion, the referent being traceable to the previous sentence. It is Clive’s speaker’s choice what is interesting in this case. He could have just answered ‘Yes’, or ‘Yes, it is’, but instead he decides to repeat (part of) what the Foreign Secretary said. Saying ‘almost’ (which, per se, is not a negative word) in fact means it is not done yet (hence the negation). This also creates a substantial amount of tension and suspense. By choosing to structure his answer this way, Clive, although avoiding an open conflict, manages to convey towards Garmony (who, as Foreign Secretary, is undoubtedly a figure of authority) an expression of undeniable defiance. Another interesting example comes from a section in Atonement which involves Paul Marshall, Leon’s friend, talking to one of the cousins and the fifteen-year-old Lola and asks her to guess what he does for a living:

(19) ’You’re a singer’, Lola said. ‘At least, you have a nice voice.’ ‘Kind but wrong. D’you know, you remind me of my favourite sister…’ Jackson interrupted. ‘You make chocolates in a factory.’ Before too much glory could be heaped upon his brother, Pierrot added, ‘We heard you talking at the pool.’ ‘Not a guess then.’ (AT, 61)

While the children’s utterances are complete, Paul Marshall’s are elided. He omits the VPs and NPs in both highlighted parts (which categorizes them as exophoric ellipsis). In this case the negative part is not separated only from the rest of his own utterances but also from whatever his co-conversationalists say (‘Not a guess then.’) The word wrong is also negative and separated from the rest of the utterance (‘That is kind but it is wrong.’), but so is kind, the positive one, which creates an interesting contrast. The latter contributes to the creation of the tension by setting two words of the opposite sides on the positivity-negativity scale against each other (before the revelation of the mystery of his exciting job, Marshall is no doubt trying to provoke the children’s curiosity). Notice that the author has the adult Paul Marshall speak differently than the children characters. His speech is rather informal while theirs is not, perhaps to demonstrate their good upbringing or possibly their lack of trust towards him, and his efforts to win it, especially Lola’s. While on the subject of contrasts, let us look at a very interesting one from Sweet Tooth where the characters‘ conversation frequently consists of brief and factual fragments since a large part of it takes place among people who are only related professionally. The following comes from Sweet Tooth and involves a comment by Ian Hamilton, a literary editor who meets Serena at a railway station where she waits for her lover Tom Haley, and she happens to spot him in an intimate dialogue with her former friend and colleague Shirley Shilling.

(20) Hamilton came over and stood by me, following the line of my gaze.

‘She’s a writer too. Commercial stuff. But not bad in fact. Nor is she. She’s just lost her father.’ (ST, 299)

Separating negation in the excerpt helps Hamilton paint a subjective picture of Shirley and set up an intriguing contrast of ‘commercial, but not bad‘: the conjunction but used here is contrastive, not corrective (Repp 2009: 150). According to Jeffries (2010), it would have been characterized under the ‘contrastives’ subcategory of opposites (Jeffries 20102: 55). It enables him to show how he despises commercial writing but also the fact that he does not see her as a black-or-white writer.

When looking at the entire utterance by Hamilton, it should also be noted how much fragmentation there is. There are no explicit cohesive ties between the first two sentences (‘She’s a writer too. Commercial stuff.’), which means the reader must be able to infer that ‘commercial stuff’ refers to Shirley’s writing.

3.6 Ellipsis as a sign of intimacy

It may seem (and very frequently it is so) that ellipsis, as Fowler (1996) says in his Linguistic Criticism, is mostly emotional and suggests intimacy. That implies that it is typical for people (or characters) who are generally more or less close to each other and know each other well, as the following excerpt (part of which we have already seen above) shows. It comes from a dialogue between Clive and Vernon.

(21) ’You know, I should have married her. When she started to go under I would have killed her with a pillow or something and saved her from everyone’s pity.’ Vernon was laughing as he steered his friend away from the Garden of Remembrance. ‘Easily said. I can just see your writing exercise-yard anthems for the cons, like what’s her name, the suffragette.’ ‘Ethel Smyth. I’d do a damn better job than she did.’

(AM, 8)

When replying to Clive, Vernon omits the subject which would have stood for Clive’s entire utterance: there is no need to include it, after all, he is talking to his best friend and the conversation is informal. Ellipsis here therefore really implies closeness. However, it is not always the case. The identity of the discourse participants and their mutual relationships undoubtedly do influence their speakers’ choices in the decision- making process within the conversation. On the other hand, omission of certain parts does not always signify closeness between the discourse participants. When we take a look at another sample from the novel, it is the police talking to Clive Linley on the phone, telling him that they will need him to help them find and identify a suspect in the case of the Lakeland rapist (whom Clive in fact had seen in person before and decided not to help the victim).

(22) The bell again, then silence. They’d gone. For a moment, the slender idea he had was lost. Then he had it, or part of it, and was just drawing the stem of a chord when the phone rang. He should have turned it off. In his irritation, he snatched it up. ‘Mr Linley?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Police. C.I.D. Standing outside your front door. Appreciate a word.’ ‘Oh. Look, can you come back in half an hour?’ ‘’Fraid not. Got a few questions for you. Might have to ask you to attend a couple of identity parades in Manchester. Help us nail a suspect. Shouldn’t take up more than a couple of days of your time. So, if you wouldn’t mind opening up, Mr Linley…’ (AM, 144)

The policeman omits a great amount of sentence parts such as articles, pronouns, verbs and verb phrases. His utterance consists mainly of nouns, noun phrases and several verbs to connect them. Or, to put it differently: his utterance only contains the parts necessary to understand it. This does not mean he knows Clive or that he wants to have an informal small talk with him, but (since it is a telephone conversation) rather, he wishes to make his contribution to the dialogue as brief and factual and probably also as audible and understandable as possible, which means that understanding is hardly an issue here. Omission here enables the avoidance of tiresome and potentially disturbing

repetition. The words that the police officer uses are those that are supposed to bear the most stress; for the sake of efficiency, he only utters those and leaves out all the rest. That may indicate that ellipsis can be a tool of implying relationships between characters, but it is certainly not exclusively a sign of intimacy or closeness. Interestingly enough, while the police officer only uses fragmented sentences when asking Clive out and explaining the situation, the ending of his part of the dialogue is different. Although unfinished, the structure of his last sentence is not fragmented, and it expresses a degree of politeness. While on the subject of the police, another Sweet Tooth example comes from remark by Shirley Shilling, Serena’s friend and MI5 colleague. They are enjoying a drink in an Irish pub when suddenly a fight occurs there.

(23) More people were joining in, there was a fair amount of shouting, and the barman, a handy-looking fellow himself with a caduceus tattooed above his wrist, was speaking into the phone. Shirley put an arm about my shoulders and propelled me towards the door. Our rum-and-Cokes with melting ice were behind us on the bar. 'Police on their way, might want witnesses. Best to go. ' (ST, 53)

Omitting subjects as well as predicates in her sentences has a lot to do with Shirley’s close relationship with Serena, but no doubt also with the tense situation they find themselves in. Her brief remarks are appropriate and effective while, of course, they increase the tension for the reader. Let us look at another two excerpts from Sweet Tooth. Both are brief exchanges between Serena and Max, but the first one is their very first conversation ever, while the other one comes from a dialogue in which Max confesses his feelings for her. Max and Serena talk for the first time when they meet at a lecture at MI5:

(24) Our bleary group roused itself to stand respectfully as the lecturer left the room. When he was gone Max turned and looked right at me. It was as if

the vertical groove at the base of his skull was telepathically sensitive. He indicated the pen in my hand. 'Taking lots of of notes.' I said, 'It was fascinating. ' (ST, 64)

At this point, Max and Serena are complete strangers. Max’s first remark towards her is missing a pronoun, which is obviously not a sign of closeness, but rather the opposite. It even creates a bit of distance between the two which may be socially desirable at first social encounter – there are no names, no personal pronouns or other indications of closeness or even sympathy just yet. A part of the second excerpt can be seen above: Serena admits to Max that she is in a relationship with Tom Haley:

(25) He picked up the chair and sat heavily. ‘Is this to punish me?’ ‘I like him.’ ‘So unprofessional.’ ‘Oh, come on. We both know what goes on.’ […] ‘He’ll find out who you are. Bound to happen.’ ‘No, it won’t.’ (ST, 252)

Let us also have a look at the second part of the dialogue this time. There may be nothing special about Serena’s elided answer which is perfectly common in both formal and informal language, but Max’s fragmented utterances signal closeness and intimacy (or rather want of one). He is crushed to find out that Serena does not want him anymore and wishes to maintain the closeness he thought they once had. As opposed to ‘So unprofessional’, the antecedent of which is not entirely clear (as mentioned above), the antecedents of the remaining cases of ellipsis can easily be traced syntactically in the dialogue. It would be therefore more fitting to say that words are omitted when the hearer is able to reconstruct the whole meaning without them; whether or not a closer

relationship with the speaker exists. Ellipsis and fragmenting, however, can be a useful tool of expressing it.

3.7 Discussion

To conclude what has been observed in the individual cases and examples from the text of the novels, ellipsis and/or fragments in here hardly ever or never cause any ambiguities or problems in understanding at all, nor do they require more effort to do so by the hearer – actually it proves to be quite the contrary. There is usually enough information, which is necessary for unproblematic, full comprehension, i.e. the parts that are omitted from the sentence are not vital. Grice’s maxim of quantity is meticulously fulfilled. There are some cases of gapping in the narrower sense of the word which occur in conversations that are not always formal. The category of NPs and verbless structures has proven to be useful mainly in expressing emphasis - the characters’ strong feelings and attitudes towards matters (by omitting the VP or even more from the complete structure and leaving only the noun or the NP, or other phrases, to attract and maintain the reader’s attention). The category of repetition and reiteration involves echo questions and fragments of the previous utterances which are used to express various emotions and attitudes from surprise through sarcasm to disbelief. They are also used as effective cohesive ties. Repeating only a section of whatever the character’s co-conversationalist has said and omitting the rest is also useful in placing emphasis. So is the separation of negation as the intensification of meaning, which in most cases makes the negative part of the utterance thematic, thus emphasized. As Fowler (1986) puts it, it has proven to be possible to use ellipsis and fragments to imply intimacy and closeness, however, they can also be used to achieve just the opposite effect, especially when used in situations where the utterance is required to be brief and factual. To sum up briefly, ellipsis and fragments in McEwan’s fiction may have several functions: they can be understood as a tool for letting the characters stress what they apparently think is the most important part (by separating it from the rest of the utterance) while enabling them to also a wide range of express emotions and atittudes. As expected, they also have a role in making the characters’ discourse similar to

authentic conversation among people (including the inferential process which enables the speaker to spend less energy while causing no difficulty understanding on the side of the hearer). This leads to further assumptions that they can as well in some cases be a tool of indicating the intensity of relationships between the characters (from formal to informal). Quite frequently, they can contribute to the elements creating tension and suspense in the text, helping the author achieve the ultimate effect of letting the reader make sense of the discourse and shape it, thus maintaining their full attention.

Chapter 4 INTRODUCTION and IDENTIFICATION CHAINS

4.1 Definition of terms

Each story, when read for the first time, is entirely new to the reader which means that each character/object/notion/institution that arises for the first time in the text must be introduced. The term introduction, as defined by Longacre (1996), ‘is a notional structure in which existence is predicated of something or someone and then a further predication is immediately made about that existent.’ (Longacre 1996: 84). Therefore, introduction does not involve only the introduction of characters but also inanimate objects or institutions. According to Martin and Rose, ‘in order to make sense of the discourse, one thing we need is to be able to keep track of who or what is being talked about at any point.’ (Martin and Rose 2003: 145) What is important is the manner in which the characters (and other inanimate things) are introduced to the reader in the text (as well as to the characters themselves/to each other in their discourse). ‘Whenever the identity of a participant is presumed, the identity has to be recovered. This can be done in various ways depending where the relevant information is.’ (Martin and Rose 2003: 158)

McEwan’s manner of identifying (mainly) the characters to the reader and providing information about them is different in various novels. It could be argued, of course, that one can only obtain a fully-fledged identification of a fictitious character after reading the entire story, since whatever the characters do, what happens to them, how they behave and deal with matters, all of these factors shape them and contribute to the overall picture.

With regards to fictional characters, the style (or way) in which the characters are described, and, indeed, the style (or way) by which characters themselves interact all reveal how we, within the cultural context in which we receive the information, are being invited to see, to understand, to appreciate, empathise, sympathise or antipathise with those characters, and what they literally, metaphorically or metonymically represent. (Bousfield 2014: 118)

To be more precise, I am interested in exploring mainly the initial points of these identification chains, what follows them and how the author manages to find creative ways of not boring the reader by not using the same pattern all the time. After all, ‘for an individual's social identity to stabilize or thicken, metadiscourses of identity must consistently circulate to organize events in which the individual participates.’ (Wortham 2003: 193) It has already been mentioned a few times that the author’s ultimate goal is to interest the reader and one of the means to achieve it is to make the discourse seem more authentic. The same, I believe, applies to the characters. Culpeper stresses that one cannot simply dismiss the humanizing approach to characterization: ‘It is difficult to deny that what we do when we read texts […], containing characters is to attempt to interpret those characters with the structures and processes which we use to interpret our real-life experiences of people.’ (Culpeper 2007: 256) McEwan’s strategies in this respect could be classified into three larger categories: the strategy of gradual revealing, the unifying elements strategy and the immediate detail summary. They involve gapping on the textual level – in the sense of omission of information the first time a character/object is mentioned in the text (the information that is either postponed or to be inferred) and in the sense of gaps (intervals) between individual pieces of information (see the definition of gaps in chapter 2). As a means of being helpful in maintaining the reader’s interest, the strategies provide a way to help the reader identify with the individual characters, although they are not black or white, but rather resemble real people with their strengths and weaknesses. It can also be assumed that the strategies help the reader even become a part of the story development. Rather than reading a report of what happened, they are enabled to be a witness to the events of the story. As has already been mentioned above, out of the three chosen McEwan novels, two (Amsterdam and Atonement) are third person point of view narratives, while Sweet Tooth is told from the point of view of the main character, Serena, in the first person. Among other things, it influences the way and frequency with which the strategies are distributed and used within the three novels. The first two strategies are applied mostly in Amsterdam and Atonement), whereas the last one, the immediate detail summary, occurs most frequently in Sweet Tooth. In Sweet Tooth, the reader is present in Serena’s mind all the time, and the whole text of the story is Serena’s thoughts and verbal exchanges. Meanwhile in the other two novels, the author needed to find a more cunning way to put the reader in the characters’

minds. This task is more difficult considering the fact that there is not just one but multiple characters to reckon with. The strategies, of course, overlap – multiple patterns can be (and are) used simultaneously. The following sections include the most interesting examples to illustrate all of the above-mentioned strategies.

4.2 Gradual revealing The strategy of gradual revealing involves initially giving the reader not much more than a name and/or title of the respective character/object. Usually there are a few facts that can be inferred from the way the story unfolds or the way the scene is described; or, in other words, context. However, there is no immediate explanation or introduction and no further identification or information about how the named person or item relates to the story. The information that the author owes the reader is only revealed gradually, along with the development of the plot. In other words, it requires more effort on the part of the reader to recover what Martin and Rose call relevant information (not to mention the necessity of the older information to be kept in mind until more information is revealed). One of the reasons the author takes advantage of this arrangement may be the fact that (not unlike with his use of ellipsis) such strategy enables him to create tension/suspense. Since the reader is partially kept in the dark about what is happening in the story, there is no other way to find out more than by reading on. It could also contribute to the overall inclusion of the reader in the story rather than just merely stating some facts of what happened at a given time and place. The last part of the hypothesis includes the assumption that such pattern offers flexibility and freedom of opinion as to the reader’s opinions and impressions of the characters and inanimate objects at first. The author only reveals little, but on the other hand he thus creates quite an immense space for imagination, guesswork and curiosity. In other words, such strategy may make the narrative more neutral in tone while, at the same time, making it possible for the reader (by witnessing whatever happens in the story) to see the action from some of the characters’ points of view and, logically, either sympathise with them or oppose them. In order for the author to create images of himself, Locher and Graham describe a phenomenon that they label positioning devices as follows:

[…] linguistic elements that are used by narrators as privileged tools to convey and build images of themselves. These can go from the choice of words to refer to self and others (what characters are called and how they are described), to particular verbs of saying (for example, using “admit” instead of “reply”), to reported speech as a way to emphasize self or other characterizations. (Locher and Graham 2010: 214)

Let us illustrate on an example from the novel Atonement. The following excerpt describes a scene in which one of the main characters, Cecilia Tallis, is mentioned for the first time.

(26) Partly because of her youth and the glory of the day, partly because of her blossoming need for a cigarette, Cecilia Tallis half ran with her flowers along the path that went by the river, by the old diving pool with its mossy brick wall, before curving away through the oak woods. (AT, 18)

As can be seen in this section of the text, the reader is given a name of the character which is set into a description of scene and setting. There is no word yet about how she is related to the story or other characters. There are things, of course, that can be inferred immediately: that Cecilia Tallis is a woman (since it is a female name), and having encountered the surname Tallis before, there is also a hint that she must be related to the previously mentioned participants in the story. It can also be observed that she is young and a smoker, but nothing about who exactly she is or how she relates to the story, no further identification. More information about Cecilia appears no sooner than on page 20.

(27) She had returned from Cambridge with a vague notion that her family was owed an uninterrupted stretch of her company. But her father remained in town, and her mother, when she wasn’t nurturing her migraines, seemed distant, even unfriendly. Cecilia had carried up trays of tea to her mother’s room – as spectacularly squalid as her own –

thinking some intimate conversations might develop. However, Emily Tallis wanted to share only tiny frets about the household, or she lay back against the pillows, her expression unreadable in the gloom, emptying her cup in wan silence. (AT, 20)

So only two pages further on, the author explains the most important background facts about the character of Cecilia (education, family, life, etc.) As has been said above, the author uses this pattern in Atonement as well as in Amsterdam many times. He gives the reader a name (usually incorporated into some kind of setting, a particular scene or description of the immediate situation), then continues developing the narrative without an immediate detailed explanation or introduction until a point where the explanation and/or introduction suddenly arises in the text (i.e. he inserts more or less extensive gaps in between individual pieces of information). Many times, therefore, there are intervals between the first time somebody or something is mentioned in the text (by name) and the actual identification (or rather, pieces of gradual identification).

4.2.1 Minor intervals between pieces of identification The gaps in between the pieces of the retrievable information vary considerably. It would be almost impossible to set up standards in term of measurability of the gaps’ extent within the text – what one considers minor could very well be considered average by another, and vice versa. The matter of the size of the gaps is therefore very relative, but I have included examples that do border on extremes in comparison with each other. In the above-mentioned case, there is a gap that consists of only two pages, so it could be categorized under this group as well. Another example from Atonement includes another one of the key characters, Cecilia’s younger sister Briony Tallis:

(28) The play – for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper – was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and lunch.

(AT, 3)

The very first lines of Atonement give the readers the name of a character (Briony) without any further information, perhaps except for the fact that Briony is a female who wrote a play. In addition, the haste and childish way of staging it may imply that Briony probably is a child. What follows this section is a detailed description of Briony staging her play called The Trials of Arabella (including its plot further in the text). Only then the character of Briony is mentioned again with more information: she is a young child of a woman named Emily Tallis.

(29) Mrs Tallis read the seven pages of The Trials of Arabella in her bedroom, with the author’s arm around her shoulder the whole while. Briony studied her mother’s face for every trace of shifting emotion, and Emily Tallis obliged with looks of alarm, snickers of glee and, at the end, grateful smiles and wise, affirming nods. (AT, 4)

It is hardly surprising that the beginning of the novel is, of course, heavily filled with new names and characters to be introduced and identified. While the author remains loyal to his strategy of only providing a little to the reader immediately (and the rest further on), it is typical for the beginning (not only) of this novel that the gaps between the identification material pieces are considerably shorter when compared to those that occur later in the story. Let us take a look at another extreme in this respect – this time from Amsterdam, an example of an extraordinarily minor gap at first. It is a scene which has already been introduced in the chapter on ellipsis, where Clive Linley gets introduced to Hart Pullman:

(30) ’And this,’ George said, ‘also from the States, is Hart Pullman.’ ‘Hart Pullman. At last. Do you remember I set your Rage poems for jazz orchestra?’

Pullman was the Beat poet, the last survivor of the Kerouac generation. He was a withered little lizard of a man who was having trouble twisting his neck to look up at Clive. (AM 10)

A certain Hart Pullman is introduced in this section of the text. As we can see, the characters’ conversation takes priority here – the author lets Clive reply to the formal introduction first before he proceeds to identify Pullman. He is mentioned without any other immediate information than the fact that he is a man from the States. The next replica reveals that he is probably a poet, and that is confirmed and further elaborated on in the next portion of the text. Hart Pullman is never mentioned again in the story of Amsterdam after his brief interaction with Clive, which raises the assumption that everything the reader needs to know about him as well as any relevant information will be included in this short section of the text. It could also be said that the gaps between portions of the crucial material here are almost close to non-existent, but the information is still revealed gradually in the conversation. The dialogue is very polite at first. However, the reader then proceeds to see the situation through the eyes of Clive and immediately acquire a negative impression of Pullman – in fact a successful positioning by the author who chooses words to describe Pullman very cunningly and puts them in Clive’s mouth.

4.2.2 Major intervals between pieces of identification While there are cases where the gaps are fairly small, there are also cases in which the size of the gaps is significantly larger in comparison. As has been mentioned before, it would be very difficult to establish any standards in terms of what constitutes minor and major size of the gaps; however, examples of major ones occur in the text of the novels that do cause the piece of information to be forgotten before another reference to it arises. After all, ‘it appears that the distance between seven sentences is long enough considerably to weaken the retrievability of a piece of information’ (Firbas 1995: 18).

Let us illustrate on the following example from Amsterdam (a conversation between Vernon and his subordinate Frank Dibben):

(31)

’Look, Vernon,’ Frank said from where he stood at the urinal. ‘I’m sorry about this morning. You’re absolutely right about Garmony. I was completely out of order. … I mean, you’re absolutely right about not giving him too much space.’ Cassius is hungry, Vernon thought. He’ll head his department, then he’ll want my job. (AM, 38-39)

In this section of the text, an unexpected name arises – Cassius, and it is unclear who it refers to. From the conversation between the characters it follows that Vernon calls Frank Cassius in his mind. Again, there is nothing but a nickname this time, no explanation as to why he would call him that, it is not even explicitly said that he is referring to him. The reader only knows what the characters are thinking and/or saying. The second (and only) time Dibben’s nickname is mentioned again in the entire novel is after a large number of 72 pages:

(32) Frank had become deputy foreign editor on his twenty-eighth birthday. Four years and three editors later, he was still there and rumored to be restless. They called him Cassius for his lean and hungry look, but this was unfair: his eyes were dark, his face long and pale, his stubble heavy, giving him the appearance of a police cell interrogator, but his manner was courteous, though a little withdrawn, and he had an attractive, wry intelligence. (AM, 105)

The author postpones the information that he owes the reader for quite a long time in this case. As we can see, he explains why they called him Cassius by using a direct quotation from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (‘… the lean and hungry look…’). Once he does that, the readers comprehend what they did not the first time that Cassius was brought up. This kind of information only makes sense on the background of what Culpeper (2007) calls schemata, ‘structured bundles of generic knowledge’ (257) in his own words. However, this degree of intertextuality causes the fact that the expectations on the readers and their educational background are quite high. One must certainly be

very well-read to be able to recognize the quotation and realize where it comes from, and without that information, even having read the section with the quote, the name makes no sense. Let us proceed to the sections of Atonement in which Paul Marshall, Leon Tallis’ friend is introduced to the reader as well as to the other characters themselves simultaneously. This man’s introduction and further identification is particularly interesting. His name first arises in a private conversation between Cecilia and Robbie Turner, her father’s protégé and later in the story, her lover:

(33) Instead she said, ‘Leon’s coming today, did you know?’ ‘I heard a rumour. That’s marvellous.’ He’s bringing a friend, this man Paul Marshall.’ ‘The chocolate millionaire. Oh no! And you’re giving him flowers!’ She smiled. Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was? She no longer understood him. They had fallen out of touch at Cambridge. It had been too difficult to do anything else. (AT, 26)

Paul Marshall gets first introduced to the reader in a dialogue that demonstrates that for neither of its participants, Cecilia or Robbie, his name is unknown and that they already have some information about him. The reader, however, is only informed at first what they are saying to each other: that Paul Marshall is a man, a friend of Leon’s and (whatever it means - that, again, is up to the reader to imagine) also a ‘chocolate millionaire’. Further information can be obtained only when both men finally come to the Tallis household:

(34) As she reached the broad landing that dominated the hallway, Leon was showing Paul Marshall through the wide-open front entrance. […] The men had removed their hats and stood waiting for her, smiling. […] Paul Marshall shook her hand and made a faint bow. There was something comically brooding about his face. His opener was conventionally dull.

‘I’ve heard an awful lot about you.’ ‘And me you.’ What she could remember was a telephone conversation with her brother some months before, during which they had discussed whether they had ever eaten, or would ever eat, an Amo bar. (AT, 47)

As we can see, further pieces of Paul Marshall’s identification are only revealed 21 pages later. It should also be noted that everything that is revealed about this man at this very point is mostly negative (his bow is faint, his face is comically brooding, his opener is dull, he is not exceedingly memorable). This brings us to a realization that (although it is a third-person narrative) we are seeing him through the eyes of Cecilia, who apparently does not like him upon their first meeting very much. This may seem insignificant, but when later in the story the reader stumbles upon Marshall’s shameful act of raping Lola Quincey, it is quite consistent with Cecilia’s first negative impression which they may have adopted. Marshall’s character continues to be described and revealed to the reader through Cecilia’s eyes, in fact mostly belittled and ridiculed:

(35) From his position between Leon and Cecilia, Marshall took control of the conversation with a ten-minute monologue.

(AT, 49)

This time even instead of Paul Marshal, only the surname appears in the text. His monologue is not in direct speech (perhaps to illustrate how tiresome it may have been), but it finally reveals what ‘chocolate millionaire’ and ‘Amo bar’ meant: Marshall produces chocolate bars for the army. Marshall himself obviously considers this one of the defining features of his personality, as we can infer from his dialogue with Lola and the twins:

(36) ‘Paul Marshall.’

Pierrot, who was the nearest, took the hand in silence, as did his brother. When it was the girl’s turn she said, ‘Lola Quincey. This is Jackson and that’s Pierrot.’ […] ‘Ah well,’ Paul Marshall said, patting his pocket, ‘I’ve got something to show you if you can guess what I do for a living.’ […] Jackson interrupted. ‘You make chocolates in a factory.’ […] He drew from his pocket a rectangular bar wrapped in greaseproof paper and measuring about four inches by one. […] ‘Sugar casing, see? Milk chocolate inside. Good for any conditions, even if it melts.’ He held his hand higher and tightened his grip, and they could see the tremor in his fingers exaggerated by the bar. ‘There’ll be one of these inside the kitbag of every soldier in the land. Standard issue.’ (AT, 58 - 61)

After the incident at the Tallis’ house, Paul Marshall is only brought up again once in the story when he marries Lola, the very person he raped, after many years. His significance in the story, however, is undoubted. If he were not part of the story, everything would have turned out differently and perhaps there would not even be a story to tell at all. To sum up briefly, this pattern involves giving a name, some setting/scene/situation/particular conversation (from which usually several facts can be inferred or observed) and then, with more or less extensive gaps between pieces of identification, gradual revealing. As we have observed, the strategy’s effect in creation of tension is apparent, as is the question of including the readers in the story. The way the author pulls the readers into individual scenes could be compared to a movie – very frequently they know nothing or very little, occasionally they are even less informed than the characters themselves, which creates the impression of the story happening in front of their eyes. The questions of what other effects could the strategy possibly have and whether it makes the text incoherent may arise here. According to Tárnyiková (2009), ‘coherence

is not a state, it is a process, a kind of a co-operative achievement (depending on the speaker’s and/or hearer’s willingness to negotiate meaning)’ (Tárnyiková 2009: 56) Much of the text, therefore, may only makes sense depending on how much a reader is able to infer. By mentioning almost nothing but a name, the author gives space to them. This strategy enables the otherwise objective, detached, third-person narrative to get partial to one of the characters while seemingly preserving the narrator’s objectivity and detachment. The narrator and the story remain separate and independent and, as stated above, the readers feel their own importance in the development of the story. Moreover, ‘there is no single, coherent identity but rather identities are related to the kinds of social situations and discursive practices in which people are involved’, as Locher and Graham (2010: 212) put it. Circumstances repeatedly change, point of view shifts and recovering pieces of the characters’ identities is subject to the changes. In addition, as Scollon (1996) says, social roles and discourse identities do not have to necessarily match (Scollon 1996: 13). The author is skilled in giving the reader the impression of being part of the story, connected with the characters, an impression that it is not the author who dictates what happens in the story, but that he (as well as the reader) is just a detached witness to events within it. When introducing Hart Pullman in Amsterdam, for instance, first there is a seemingly emotionless, polite dialogue between the two characters, then in the text that follows, the author slides into the mind of Clive who is able to express what he thinks about Pullman. When Vernon mentions Cassius, there is very little else, only then the author again slides into the mind of one of the characters (this time, Vernon). Then Cassius is mentioned again after a considerable period of time.

4.3 Unifying elements While one strategy consists in mentioning a name first and gradually providing pieces of identification material, another strategy can be observed which involves an assumption that some information already should be apparent to the reader.

According to Grimes (1984), there is a purpose of zero or implicit identification:

It helps to bridge the gap between identification and reference. There are many cases where the hearer is expected to know who the participants are by deducing it from the context; he is not told by any overt linguistic signal.

(Grimes 1984: 50)

Before the characters (and/or other things) are introduced by name, sometimes the readers have already retrieved some amount of information either from the preceding sections of the story, or from what could be called general world knowledge.

4.3.1 Unifying elements within the story In the novels that tell stories of numerous characters (and things), it is largely impossible to introduce and identify each of them independently, without a reference to another. By mentioning a character or an object for the first time (and then more times further on in the story), the author often creates another opportunity for himself to bring pieces of the identification together.

The assumption is that these have the role of what could be called unifying elements – characters or things in the stories that are not active or significantly important for the overall plot of the story themselves, but are in it nevertheless and operate as something that the characters have in common and can be thus used as means of introduction and identification. Let us look at the example from Atonement which we have already analyzed above:

(37) The play – for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper – was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and lunch.

(AT, 3)

Only one page further on, Briony’s mother is introduced (excerpt 29) and the second mention of Briony occurs in the very same sentence the mentions her mother for the first time. Let us not disregard the play that Briony wrote, however. The play is described in detail the first time it is mentioned, and this time (its title in particular) is mentioned again, although it is of not much importance for the story itself, so the question of why would it be mentioned so frequently at all may be posed here. In

this particular case the play unites Briony, Mrs Tallis, and, as we find out later, also her brother Leon and in fact the entire family as well as Leon’s friend, the characters that are introduced later. Another example of the unifying elements strategy comes, once again, from Amsterdam:

(38) Two former lovers of Molly Lane stood waiting outside the crematorium chapel with their backs to the February chill. (AM, 3)

With nothing but a name, it may be inferred that Molly Lane is a female who had two lovers. The word former, as well as crematorium chapel, indicate that she may be dead, which is confirmed later:

(39) ’When she did it was too late.’ ’Rapid onset.’ ‘Poor Molly.’ (AM, 3)

The dialogue reveals that Molly died of an unspecified disease. She is already deceased, inactive, therefore not of much importance to the development of the story anymore (as she cannot actively participate in it), but still, it is her who is the topic of this portion of the text, no doubt to give the reader something that will unite the two men (her former lovers) in their mind. In fact she brings together not only Clive and Vernon (who happen to be best friends), but also, among her other former lovers, the Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony, or, for example, also her husband George Lane. The following contains the section of the text in which Julian Garmony is introduced (to the readers as well as Clive):

(40) ‘Mr Linley. I’m sorry to intrude on your thoughts,’ the man said, drawing his hand away. Clive assumed he was a musician, or someone come to

collect his autograph, and shrank his face into its mask of patience. ‘That’s all right.’ ‘I was wondering if you’d have the time to come across and talk to the Foreign Secretary. He’s keen to meet you.’ […] Clive pursed his lips. He didn’t want to be introduced to Julian Garmony, but nor did he want to go to the bother of snubbing him. […] ‘Hey, Linley. No talking to the enemy!’ The enemy indeed. What had attracted her? He was a strange-looking fellow; large head, with wavy black hair that was all his own, a terrible pallor, thin unsensual lips. He had made a life in the political marketplace with an unexceptional stall of xenophobic and punitive opinions. Vernon’s explanation had always been simple: high-ranking bastard, hot in the sack. But she could have found that anywhere. There must also have been the hidden talent that had got him to where he was and even now was driving him to challenge the PM for his job. (AM, 13)

While Vernon and Clive, being both Molly Lane’s former lovers, became best friends, the excerpt above undoubtedly proves that Clive does not feel similarly about Julian Garmony. It appears to be quite the contrary when Clive’s reluctance to even meet him is considered, as well as the fact he thinks of Garmony as an enemy and of Garmony’s political opinions as negative or wrong. Even though Clive (as well as Vernon, in fact) is shocked by the fact that Molly was attracted to such a man, he does silently admit that since she used to love him, there must have been something good about Garmony. It may be under shaky circumstances, but once again the characters unite in a way in the name of deceased Molly Lane. It seems not only the references within the scope of the story are important as a device of introduction. The author frequently introduces unifying elements into the story (either characters or things), which are not in any way active themselves but rather help introduce, identify and unite major characters of the story as well as demonstrate the relationships between them. Since this strategy also makes it possible to include the unifying elements in the process of gradual unveiling of information, it can also help bring the pieces of identification together, thus proving that the strategy of gradual revealing as well as the unifying elements strategy can both be used simultaneously.

4.3.2 Intertextual references

This strategy relies a lot on the intertextuality. McEwan uses well-known people and/or facts/things to introduce and identify his characters as well as whatever they are associated with. This enables him (again, not unlike what has been observed with the cases of ellipsis) to make his story (and the characters and parts of it) even more real to the readers; such pattern undoubtedly helps them identify themselves with it. Undoubtedly it must be much easier to imagine certain events and people depicted on the background of what actually happened in stark reality.

The above-mentioned case with the nickname ‘Cassius’ could well be an example. What illustrates this is, for instance, the following excerpt from the second part of Atonement in which Robbie Turner (who, as we know, had been sent to prison and eventually recruited for the army) and his corporals stumble upon (allegedly brutal) brothers in France during the war:

(41) Then, at the sound of footsteps, they turned and saw two men standing in the entrance. They each held something in their hands, a club perhaps, or a shotgun. In the fading light it was not possible to tell. Nor could they see the faces of the French brothers. The voice was soft. ‘Bonsoir, Messieurs.’ ‘Bonsoir.’ As Turner got up from his straw bed he took the revolver. The corporals reached for their rifles. ‘Go easy’, he whispered. ‘Anglais? Belges?’ ‘Anglais.’ (AT, 197-198)

The above described situation is, of course, extremely tense, the reader has been able to infer that the war is in progress and Robbie Turner with his corporals find themselves in France. The introduction to the French brothers who are at home here consists of them interrogating them in French about their nationality, and an even briefer response from the soldiers’ side. The background of the war explains a lot for the readers if they have sufficient information on this part of the history – not only why there are not any

names mentioned in the conversation (after all, nationality is practically the only part of the men’s identity that matters at the moment), but also why the exchange is so short and brisk and why is it happening in French. It should also be noted that in the previous sections of the text the French brothers have been first introduced by their mother who warns Turner and his entourage that they are supposedly brutal and begs them to leave immediately, since her sons would even kill her if they found them there. Being aware of this, as well as of the war background, the reader is already tense at the encounter and expects anything else but what eventually happens. Let us also look at intertextual references as an introduction strategy in Amsterdam: this time not a character but an object, Clive Linley’s house, will be followed from the point where it is brought up in the text for the very first time, which is early at the beginning, at Molly’s funeral, as Clive and Vernon are remembering her.

(42) He thought it was a signal, the way she held his gaze, and sure enough, they were back together that April. She moved into the studio in South Kensington and stayed through the summer.

(AM, 7)

The woman who moved into Clive’s studio was, of course, Molly; her ‘dead woman’s significance’ has been discussed above. Clive’s house is a part of the composer’s identity, it is a place where he lives and composes his masterpieces. It is not surprising that the fact that his house had a studio is mentioned the very first time it appears in the story. In fact, Clive’s occupation appears to be so important that the author uses a synecdoche here: the studio as the key part stands for the house.

(43) An hour later Vernon’s car, which was absurdly small to have a chauffeur, dropped Clive in South Kensington. Vernon got out to say goodbye. […] Clive let himself into the house and stood in the hallway, absorbing the warmth of the radiators and the silence. A note from his housekeeper told him there was a flask of coffee in the studio.

(AM, 18)

The location of Clive’s residence is mentioned again here and it stands for the house. It seems as if the author was especially fond of using either South Kensington (a London quarter well-known not only for the museums but perhaps mainly for The Royal Albert Hall) or the word studio instead of ‘house’ or ‘home’. Both have the potential to remind the readers of just how an important, talented and pompous composer Clive is.

(44) At last he was warm enough, though his left hand still tingled. He removed his coat and slung it over Molly’s chair. Before returning to the piano he went about the room turning on lamps.

(AM, 20)

There is no mention of the house in this excerpt (which is only separated from the previous one by several paragraphs), but it does describe parts of it and again stresses its warmth and coziness (which contributes to the positive impression of a refuge for Clive) and finally, it mentions Molly again, as well as the next time that the house is brought up again:

(45) Molly used to say that what she loved most about Clive’s house was that he had lived in it for so long. […] Clive inherited from a rich and childless uncle a gigantic stuccoed villa with a purposed-built two-storey artist’s studio on the third and fourth floors whose vast arched windows faced north over a mess of pitched roofs.

(AM, 45)

By this point in the novel it has already become apparent that nearly each time that Clive’s house is mentioned, it either includes the reference to South Kensington, or the studio of his in it, or some other reference to well-known music. The description above contributes to the overall showy impression of the composer’s house (‘a gigantic stuccoed villa’) and it continues on the very same page and further:

(46) Certain celebrities passed through. John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent a week there. Jimi Hendrix stayed a night, and was the likely cause of a fire which destroyed the bannisters. As the decade progressed, the house calmed down. […] Oil paintings by English and Danish impressionists hung in proximity to faded posters advertising Clive’s early triumphs or famous rock concerts – the Beatles at Shea stadium, Bob Dylan on the Isle of Wight, the Rolling Stones at Atlamont. Some of the posters were worth more than the paintings.

(AM, 45-46)

A lot of globally known names arise here in one place in connection to Clive’s house and the world of successful musicians and artists that Clive is supposed to belong in could not have been depicted in a more stunning and apparent way. By putting John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Jimi Hendrix into Clive’s bed, in fact, and hanging Clive’s ‘triumphs’ onto the wall along with posters of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, in a way, the author puts Clive Linley on the same pedestal as all these people and it can hardly be argued that in music, one cannot build a higher pedestal than that. Not only is Clive’s house an object of many intertextual references, but it could also be classified as another unifying element into the category above.

From what has been discussed, it seems not only the references within the scope of the story are important as a device of introduction. The author frequently introduces unifying elements into the story (either characters or things) which are not in any way active themselves but rather help introduce, identify and unite major characters of the story as well as demonstrate the relationships between them (i.e. they are a part of the construction of identity). Since this strategy also makes it possible to include the unifying elements in the process of gradual unveiling of information, it can also help bring the individual pieces of identification together (in other words, bridge the gaps), thus proving that the strategy of gradual revealing as well as the unifying elements strategy can both be used at the same time. The intertextual references make the author’s fictitious world and the characters in it seem real and add a lot of authenticity to the narrative.

4.4 Immediate detail summary The last strategy to be discussed in this chapter seems to differ considerably from the previous two. While in Amsterdam and Atonement the author in majority of cases strictly and carefully adheres to the pattern of postponing or gradual uncovering of the information about the characters, upon the first sight, Sweet Tooth appears to be full of introductions of, so to speak, the opposite kind: once the name occurs in the text, it is immediately (or almost immediately) followed by a more or less detailed summary of either personal or biographical facts, details and/or a summary of the particular character’s relation to the story of the novel, which, of course, includes the link to the main character of the story – Serena Frome. There is usually a gap (or gaps) between the brief summary and the rest of the information or details. The story is told in first person, from the point of view of Serena, which means that there is a significant difference between this strategy and the previous two ones in the aspect of the reader’s identification with the characters. While the strategy of gradual revealing and the unifying elements strategy (used extensively in Amsterdam and Atonement which are both third person narratives) make it possible for the reader to see the scene from the perspectives of different characters, in fact through their eyes (thus unconsciously acquiring their opinions and feelings and adopting them as our own), the strategy of immediate detailed summary of identification pieces requires Serena, the narrator, to present them. That inevitably means that the reader will mostly identify with her, adopt opinions and attitudes that are hers and see things though her eyes.

4.4.1 Summary of the character’s personal or biographical facts Serena uses the pattern of summarizing the characters’ personal or biographical facts mostly to introduce to the readers people in her life who were of (certain) significance, but some of them hardly ever or never occur in the story after this initial introduction. This is probably partly the reason why the introduction is so detailed – these characters are only given limited space within the extent of the story, and yet they somehow contribute to it. It is, therefore, only reasonable to make their quick entrance (which, at the same time, is frequently also their exit) sufficient in terms of information. Let us take a look at the first example in which Serena talks about her former boyfriend Jeremy Mott:

(47) Finals were only weeks away and I had a new boyfriend, Jeremy Mott. He was of a certain old-fashioned type – lanky, large-nosed, with an outsized Adam’s apple. He was unkempt, clever in an understated way, and extremely polite. I’d noticed quite a few of his sort around. They all seemed to be descended from a single family and come from public schools in the north of England, where they were issued with the same clothes. These were the last men on earth still wearing Harris tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows and trim on the cuffs. I learned, though not from Jeremy, that he was expected to get a first and that he had already published an article in a scholarly journal of sixteenth- century studies.

(ST, 11-12)

Jeremy is described in great detail the very first time he is mentioned. Serena considers it important to say what he looked like, what he used to wear, that he was very clever and (although that was merely implied) that he was extremely modest. The whole section of the text dealing with Jeremy’s introduction is aimed at one thing – to convey that he was a nice, gentle, clever man, and at the same time insinuate that something was not completely right with him. The thing that was ‘wrong‘ (and that, as a final touch, helps paint the complete picture of Jeremy just six pages further) is something that Jeremy himself could not have known earlier:

(48) Some weeks later he wrote tender, regretful letter to say that he had fallen in love with a violinist he’d heard one evening at the Usher Hall playing a Bruch concerto, a young German from Dusseldorf with an exquisite tone, especially in the slow movement. His name was Manfred.

(ST, 18)

Such introduction, generously filled with information, helps the reader form an image of the character. Jeremy‘s role in the story was to associate Serena with her

future lover (and his teacher) Tony Canning, and after he served this purpose, his significance for the story was over. While on the subject of the Tony Canning‘s character, his introduction and identification also belongs to this subcategory. Although his love affair with Serena is a part of the story and she remembers him several times during the course of it even much later (after all, he was much more important for her than Jeremy was), everything that was significant about his character (his past, his characteristics, his achievements, etc.) is briefly summarized in one paragraph at the beginning, the first time he is mentioned:

(49) Suddenly, from out of an alley, there appeared before us under the inadequate street lighting Jeremy’s history tutor, Tony Canning. When we were introduced he shook my hand, and held on it far too lingeringly, I thought. He was in his early fifties – about my father’s age – and I knew only what Jeremy had already told me. He was a professor, a one-time friend of the Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, who had been to dine in his college. The two men had fallen out one drunken evening over the policy of internment without trial in Northern Ireland. Professor Canning had chaired a commission on historical sites, sat on various advisory boards, was a trustee of the British Museum and had written a highly regarded book about the Congress of Vienna.

(ST, 13)

Up to this point, Serena introduces Tony Canning almost neutrally by stating simple facts about his life and his current situation as well as the connection to Jeremy. However, she continues about Canning later and adds, in fact, a plot summary, which categorizes the rest of the excerpt about him into the next subcategory.

4.4.2 Summary of the characters’ connection to the plot (or a part of it) The character’s connection to or their role in the plot of the novel are by no means a less important part of their identity. Their acts and their behaviour contribute to the complete picture. Professor Canning breaks off his affair with Serena before she is even hired by

MI5, so he is one of the characters whose significance does not consist in their presence in the story. His introduction continues by a summary of everything he did in connection to Serena:

(50) And though it was strictly true that Tony Canning ended up recruiting me for MI5, his motives were complicated and he had no official sanction.

[…] Professor Canning, an old MI5 hand himself, thought he was making them a gift in the spirit of expiation. His case was more complex and sadder than anyone knew. He would change my life and behave with selfless cruelty as he prepared to set out on a journey with no hope of return. If I know so little about him even now, it’s because I accompanied him only a very small part of the way. (ST, 13 - 17)

It should also be noticed how Serena practically in a short summary discloses everything that the reader finds out later in detail: the professor’s role in her life and how things ended up for him. Her characterization almost aspires to be poetic when she uses metaphors and even an oxymoron (‘selfless cruelty’). While the previously mentioned pattern of providing descriptive or biographical facts enables the readers to form certain images of the characters for themselves, giving them summaries of large parts of the story is much more manipulative. Not only do the readers adopt the opinions and impressions of Serena (who is telling the story), but they are also immediately offered the characters’ entire stories, however briefly, often including the information about how they will end up. This pattern makes it possible to continue reading the story with an already formed picture in the readers’ minds, which provides space for surprise and makes the impact even more extensive, if it occurs. It may seem that this pattern is only used for characters who appear in the story briefly and never return again. That, however, is not true. A very similar pattern occurs in the first sentence of the novel, for example. It contains Serena’s introduction of herself and in fact summarizes the story of Sweet Tooth in a few words:

(51) My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service. I didn’t return safely. Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing.

(ST, 1)

As has been mentioned above, although this pattern is typical mostly for Sweet Tooth, it occurs occasionally in other two novels. Let us take a look at one from Amsterdam, where the following short portion of the text including Clive and Vernon’s dialogue summarizes the whole life of Molly Lane:

(52) ‘She would have killed herself rather than end up like that,’ Vernon Halliday said. He had lived with her for a year in Paris in ’74 when he had his first job with the Reuters and Molly did something or other for Vogue.

‘Brain-dead and in George’s clutches,’ Clive said. George, the sad, rich publisher who doted on her and whom, to everyone’s surprise, she had not left, though she always treated him badly. (AM, 5)

Note, however, that this is not the first time Molly is mentioned in the text. Her existence as well as several facts about her were stated before, but it is not until this point that the reader can find out more (another extensive gap), which is another manifestation of how the strategies can overlap.

4.5 Discussion

Following individual points of identification since the introduction, i.e. the very first mention of a character or an object in the text of the novels towards the following pieces of information has revealed several patterns which can be used simultaneously, the first

of them involving gradual revealing of the information and varying the intervals (gaps) in between them. While minor (so to speak, non-existent) gaps are applied wherever the information is required earlier rather than later, the major ones, consisting of several tens of pages, occur occasionally and require quite an extensive knowledge, preparedness and memory from the reader. Both patterns reveal information gradually, allowing the story to ‘unfold’ in front of the reader and making them feel much more included.

The pattern of using unifying elements involves other characters and mutual relationships as a means of introduction and identification process. Being used simultaneously with the strategy of gradual revealing, it provides something the characters have in common and demonstrates their mutual relationships. Intertextual references (in this case throughout the text of the novels themselves, but mainly references outside the analyzed text) have a very similar function; in fact the categories overlap in some aspects. Intertextual references mainly to the pop culture (including actual names of artists) help the reader identify with the story more easily. The immediate detail summary, either of the character’s personal/ biographical facts or the character’s connection to the plot of the novel, mostly found in Sweet Tooth, represent a kind of an opposite of the gradual revealing. It is used mostly (but not exclusively) to introduce characters who appear in the story briefly and never return again. The pattern, however paradoxical it may seem, creates space for surprise and impact. By being provided larger chunks of information, the reader gains a sense of being thoroughly informed of everything significant. That enables the author to impact the reader hard with potential surprise. By making the story a first-person narrative, the author does not give the reader as much feeling of inclusion as with the previous two patterns, but on the other hand, he enables the reader to identify and empathize with one person who is telling the story. Although each of the analyzed categories differs from the others, they all help create more tension in the story – either by postponing the due information, separating and providing it gradually, or by condensing the most important part of it. The structuring of the characters’ discourse allows the reader to be part of the development while the author remains nearly invisible.

Chapter 5 HYBRID QUOTATIONS and REPORTED SPEECH

5.1 Definition of terms

There are various ways of reporting a speech act and the reasons for preferring direct speech over indirect speech (and vice versa) within the text of a novel may vary, but interestingly, subtle patterns seem to exist in Ian McEwan’s way of constructing the characters’ discourse within this domain, too. The author’s decision making in this respect is intriguing not only in the aspect of choosing between the two options. Occasionally even the borderlines between direct and indirect speech become blurred. There are cases which would be, strictly speaking, defined as indirect speech (there are gaps in the sense of a lack of quotation marks separating the utterance from the rest of the text, to be precise). However, their construction/structure differs. It is as if a sudden change in the point of view occurred. The phenomenon could be described as indirect speech incorporating the same or very similar wording as the character would use if the author had used direct speech instead. To be even more precise, there are two categories of the above mentioned pattern of hybrid quotations: a) direct speech incorporated into the structure of a sentence (however, with no quotation marks or other separating devices, with the exception of the ocassional use of a capitalization). Based on the classification and characterization by Philippe De Brabanter (2010), the below listed examples would rank among the hybrid quoting of non-constituents category. I have decided to use this term, however, other terms coined by other authors exist that fit in this category. For instance, drawing on Bakhtin’s work, Holt (1996) talks about DRS, i.e. direct reported speech, defined more vaguely as the speaker structuring ‘[…] the utterance in such a way as to suggest that he or she is simply reproducing a former locution (speakers can also directly report thought).’ (Holt 1996: 220) Another fitting term is free direct discourse characterized by ‘the absence of reporting verbs and quotation marks, and hence the absence of any overt trace of the narrator’s presence.’ (Black 2006: 65)

b) speech which is indirect, but consists of a certain wording in the form which resembles direct speech significantly and involves as much information as direct speech would (had it been used instead). While the examples of the first category would mostly be judged, strictly speaking, ungrammatical, the opposite is true for the second category.

[…] indirect quotations cannot be reproduced as such messages and aspects that are inherently nonreferential (e.g. “hello!” or the exclamatory force of an utterance), although they can represent them through reference and predication in various ways (e.g. verbs of saying such as greet and exclaim). In addition, they allow the narrator’s perspective to intrude on the original utterance. (Hickmann 1993: 65)

While on the subject of illocutionary verbs of saying, Caldas-Coulthard (1992) mentions ‘glossing’ ones such as the verb claim, threaten, boast in connection with the responsibility (or the absence thereof) for what is being reported: the verb claim, for instance, definitely possesses semantic qualities that help the reporter avoid being held responsible. Indirect speech incorporating the same or very similar wording as the character would use if it were direct speech is used here probably to indicate that the content of the speaker’s message was long, tedious or boring and probably not important enough to make it into direct speech (yet, it is included in its entirety). As Hickmann (1993) says, the narrator may intrude more easily and still preserve their neutral, detached image, so their presence and intrusion is not felt by the reader at all. Conversely, cases when the author decides to use incorporate direct speech into the middle of the indirect speech sentence also occur and have the opposite effect while still preserving the impression of smoothness (i.e. the author/narrator remains non-intrusive). It may also be the intention of the author to keep certain information unclear – especially who is talking at which point, and, even more significantly, whether the contents of the utterance are being said out loud or unrealized, just pondered in the mind of the character. The overall distribution is less specific and the anonymity that is thus achieved intensely contributes to the reader’s feeling of autonomy within the entire frame of the story (which has already been mentioned and discussed in the previous chapters).

Hickmann also mentions the verbs of saying which may be used to indicate the speaking character’s internal state:

Narrators can also report speech events in less explicit ways that do not refer to speech. For example, they can use propositional attitudes (such as think, want, know), rather than verbs of saying. Such verbs do not represent speech qua speech, that is as a communicative event involving another interlocutor, but rather they focus on the speaker’s deducible internal states and processes, e.g. thoughts, plans, emotions. (Hickmann 1993: 66)

It may be interesting to note that these verbs are another means of forcing the narrator’s opinions on the reader, rather than enabling the readers to figure out the characters’ state of mind on their own by inferring it from only what has been explicitly said.

The basic difference between direct and indirect speech lies in what the two focus on: ‘[…] indirect speech focuses on what is said (the gist of a particular message) whereas direct speech focuses on creating a mental representation of the described situation. (Eerland, Engelen and Zwaan 2013)

Therefore, when instead of direct speech the indirect speech is used, on one hand it may be aimed to have an emphasizing effect on the tediousness and redundancy of the information that is being conveyed by the characters. This strategy may be used in order not to make that information stand out but rather, on the contrary, make it as forgettable as possible.

Participants showed superior memory for the exact wording of an utterance when it had the form of a direct speech quotation as compared to an indirect speech quotation (Experiment 5). Apparently, direct speech makes the exact wording of an utterance more salient, enhancing memory for the surface structure of the utterance, whereas indirect speech leads comprehenders to focus more on constructing a situation model.

(Eerland, Engelen and Zwaan 2013)

It also has to be noted that whenever anything is quoted or reported, there is bound to be a difference, even if it is just very minor. ‘Whilst many texts claim to represent ‘faithfully’ (i.e. verbatim) the words of others, in fact there is always a gap between the original version and the quotation, even if no malice is intended.’ (Jeffries 2010: 130) In McEwan's selected texts generally smaller sections of direct speech are frequently inserted somewhere within or, more prominently, at the end of an utterance which itself is in indirect speech, as if to emphasize that final part as much as possible. It should also definitely be stressed once again that these category a) insertions of direct speech into a reported utterance (within, not at the end) are treated as a part of the utterance. As mentioned above, there are no quotation marks and the text continues smoothly, without disturbance. Clark and Gerrig would classify those as hybrid (or incorporated) quotations. ‘The essence of quotation is demonstrating something rather than describing it, and demonstrations come mixed with descriptions in hybrids of many forms.’ (Clark and Gerrig 1990: 791) In other cases this strategy aims to create the impression of complicatedness, especially those sections where a dialogue, or, in many instances rather a monologue, is stated nearly word by word (not separated by the quotation marks) in a form that significantly resembles a stream of consciousness; which, as Fowler (2003) says, ‘seeks to give the illusion of directness by suppressing the author and by miming the associative flux of pre-verbal thought.’ (Fowler 2003: 93) Let us take a look again at individual examples of both categories of hybrid quotations from all three chosen novels and analyze how the author’s stylistic decisions correspond to the basic hypothesis that indirect speech is preferred and used to achieve the effect of complicatedness (and in some cases, extensive length and tediousness), whereas direct speech, on the other hand, to emphasize.

5.2 Direct speech incorporated into the structure of a sentence (hybrid quotations)

As mentioned above, to put it briefly, this category involves direct speech incorporated into reported speech without the quotation marks. Most of the time they are a part of a larger reported speech unit and involve no more than a few lexical units.

5.2.1 Lover to lover

The category of hybrid quotations is distributed into several subcategories, depending on the identity/relationship between the discourse participants. The first example to take a look at comes from Amsterdam:

(53) He’d always been of the hammer and tongs school. She taught him sexual stealth, the occasional necessity of stillness. Lie still, like this, look at me, really look at me. We’re a time bomb. He was almost thirty, by today’s standards a late developer.

(AM, 7)

The excerpt refers to Clive’ fond memories of his lover Molly and of her impact on his sexual development. Molly’s exact words to him from their past encounters are expressed in direct speech (without the quotation marks). As Coulmas (1986) says, direct reported speech ‘evokes the original speech situation and conveys, or claims to convey, the exact words of the original speaker in direct discourse.’ (Coulmas 1986: 2) While preserving the smoothness and coherence/cohesion of the text, the hybrid quotation here also makes the words stand out significantly and moves the reader closer to Clive’s thoughts and memories exactly as they are. It brings the reader to the awareness of the fact that while Clive may remember their sexual encounters more or less vaguely, these words were the ones he still remembers verbatim even after all those years. These words follow a general description of what they are supposed to demonstrate vividly.

Indirect speech quotations are a descriptive form of language which means that they are aimed at conveying the gist of an utterance without necessarily drawing attention to its specific realization. Direct speech, on the other hand, is a depictive form of language. It offers the listener a more direct perceptual experience – comparable to looking at a Picasso painting itself, rather than reading a description of that painting. (Erland, Engelen and Zwaan 2013)

What precedes Molly’s exact words is descriptive. The direct speech incorporated in the excerpt is what represents the ‘specific realization’ (or, ‘the Picasso painting itself’.) This pattern is not limited to any of the three novels, thus Sweet Tooth, although it differs from the other two in various aspects (discussed in the previous chapters), is not an exception in this one. Being told from the point of view of Serena, the main character, it involves this pattern on multiple occasions. One of the excerpts that may illustrate it best comes from Serena’s description of the letter she sent her former lover turned gay, Jeremy:

(54) I wrote back to congratulate him, and felt mature as I exaggerated my delight for his benefit. Such liaisons had only been legal for five years and were a novelty to me. I told him that there was no need to come all the way to Cambridge, that I’d always have the fondest memories, that he was the loveliest of men, and I looked forward to meeting Manfred one day, please let’s keep in touch, Goodbye!

(ST, 19)

Serena reports most of the contents of her letter to Jeremy, as the sequence of tenses illustrate, but finishes it in direct speech, and the tense shifts back to the present. Note that the author even puts a capital G in Goodbye. It seems as if Serena were, so to speak, talking to the reader and then suddenly utters words that were meant for Jeremy. If we adopt Eerland, Engelen and Zwaan’s assertion that direct speech is remembered more easily, it can be assumed that the part of the utterance that is shifted from reported speech to direct speech is the part that the character remembers best; therefore it has an emphasizing effect. There may also be a comparative effect as a consequence of using such a structure. While Serena reports how Jeremy is lovely, how she wanted to meet Manfred, how she would remember him fondly, the part she puts in direct speech (thus emphasizing it) involves a polite offer to keep in touch and a resounding Goodbye with a capital G. Such construction may contribute to the distinction between what Serena considers a matter of the past (thus not so important) and what she wishes to stress.

5.2.2. Employer/employee

The example below also comes from Sweet Tooth and it is particularly interesting when the fact that it actually involves a dialogue between Serena (a potential employee) and Harry Tapp (a representative of a potential employer) is taken into consideration.

(55) In the course of fifty minutes the three of us colluded in the construction of a character profile for me. I was essentially a mathematician with other suitable interests. But how on earth had I ended up with a third?

[…] Tapp asked me if I ever had taken an interest in encryption. No, but I confessed weakness for current affairs. […] Then there was my passion for English history. Again, Harry Tapp perked up. What in particular? The Glorious revolution. Ah now, that was very interesting indeed! And then, later, who was my intellectual hero? I talked of Churchill, not as a politician, but as a historian (I summarized the “incomparable” account of Trafalgar), as the Nobel Laureate for Literature, and then as the water-colorist. (ST, 40-41)

When talking about the borderlines between direct and reported speech not being clearly defined, the above is a classic example of how blurred they can be. The direct speech arises in the middle of the sentences now and then, wording exactly what the participants of the dialogue said, however, without punctuation that is usually deemed necessary. As opposed to the previous example, though, there is no tense shift to the present, it remains the past. The structure itself is also hybrid: although the entire section consists of the interaction between Serena and Tapp, including question marks and quotation marks, it still remains in the first person point of view. It is also worth noticing that while the entire dialogue between the two lacks any quotation marks in the text, they are indeed used when Serena mentions the ‘incomparable’ account of Trafalgar. She is actually quoting herself here (‘incomparable’ is probably the very word she used when she was talking to Tapp). It even seems that she uses the quotation

marks to ridicule herself to an extent, her pompous word choice and her decision to tell her potential boss exactly what he wanted to hear from her. Using such a loose, hybrid structure in this dialogue is certainly not a coincidence. As mentioned before, such construction resembles a stream of consciousness and is in fact a fragment of Serena’s recollection of the situation.

5.2.3 Inner dialogue/unrealized utterances

As has already been suggested, with two of the novels being third-person point of view narratives, the reader is presented with not only what is said out loud, but the characters' thoughts as well. Strictly speaking, they cannot always be labeled soliloquy, but quite frequently they may seem so to the reader. By the inner dialogue I mean a sort of a single character’s conversation with self (also characterized as such by Fowler 1996), however, not physically uttered out loud (realized). Although in these cases, there is just a single discourse participant, these utterances are still addressed to someone, even if the addresser and the addressee of the utterance are the same person. These excerpts are not any less interesting to take a look at, because although they are not actually uttered by the characters, they are still given a lexical form by the author and, as Bakhtin (1981) says, ‘the dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is, of course, a property of any discourse’ (Bakhtin 1981: 279).

While most of the examples would fall into category b), there are some that include very short utterances that cross the boundaries of a mere report. Unrealized utterances are, in general, hybrid quotations about which the author lets the reader know that they originated in the mind of a particular character, and were limited to that (hence ‘unrealized’). Below is an example from Atonement that comes from the section in the first part of the novel where Robbie has discovered that Cecilia had received his embarrassing letter and is thinking feverishly and desperately about what he should do about it.

(56) Still, it remained tempting to walk away. He could write her an apology from the safety of his study. Coward!

(AT, 131)

The first two sentences in the excerpt are merely a report of Robbie's thoughts, but then a resounding exclamation embodies what crossed Robbie’s mind exactly in that situation. An example that is very similar in structure to the previous two comes from Atonement and undoubtedly suggests that the author indeed uses the strategy of direct speech insertion within his work to achieve the goal discussed above. It comes from the second part of the novel where Robbie Turner and two corporals meet an old woman at her farm in France, seek help with her but she is not willing to provide it out of irrational fear of her own sons:

(57) Before she could start again he said, ‘Please bring us what I asked for or we’ll come and get it for ourselves.’

‘My sons are brutes. They’ll kill me.’ He would have preferred to say, So be it, but instead he walked away and called over his shoulder, ‘I’ll talk to them.’ (AT, 196)

The piece of inserted direct speech was actually never uttered out loud by Turner, but only remained in his thoughts. However, the author still chooses to highlight its beginning with a capital S instead of just using quotation marks, which he does use just a few sentence units later when Turner says he would talk to the sons. The excerpt also shows several layers of discourse operating simultaneously. It can be assumed that this structure is indeed meant as a means of distinction - in order for the reader not only to safely find out who is talking to whom at which point (as mentioned above), but also what part of the utterance is only realized in the mind of the character. This type of utterance structure no doubt also achieves the same as the above examples from Sweet Tooth - the directness of speech gives it earnestness, gravity and, so to speak, weight that would otherwise have been lost in a mere report.

5.2.4 Miscellaneous

The following excerpt is from the last part of Atonement (a part in which Briony is already grown up and working as a nurse at a hospital during the war). It describes how

Briony’s friend, Nurse Fiona (they both work at the same hospital) imitates some of their patients’ speech. This example even further demonstrates how the strategy is used in the function of a distinguishing tool.

(58) Fiona had her own version of Lambeth Cockney, and with heartless exaggeration caught the ignorance of some patients, and their pleading, whining voices. It’s me ’art, Nurse. It’s always been on the wrong side. Me mum was just the same. Is it true your baby comes out of your bottom, Nurse? ‘Cos I don’t know how mine’s going to fit, seeing as ’ow I’m always blocked. I ‘ad six nippers, then I goes and leaves one on a bus, the eighty-eight up from Brixton. Must ‘have left ‘im on the seat. Never saw ‘im again, Nurse. Really upset, I was. Cried me eyes out.

(AT, 289-290)

This particular example is, of course, a bit different: it involves a piece of utterance that Nurse Fiona actually had said out loud (and some poor Cockney expecting mother whom she is imitating, even before Fiona). However, the author still chooses to foreground it by omitting the quotation marks, which leads to further emphasizing the effect of exaggeration and mockery that the utterance is supposed to possess. Rather than a feature of mind style that would have suggested ‘some salient cognitive habit or deficit‘ (Semino 2002: 99), it is a representation (and an expression ) of the sociolinguistic aspect.

Many of the examples of this pattern could also be classified as so-called text colonies (defined as ‘a text whose component parts do not derive their meaning from the sequence in which they are placed’ (Hoey 1986: 65)). As Tárnyiková mentions, even ‘the language of fiction is not immune to text colonies when there is an intention to introduce a mosaic of isolated “islands” forming a whole’. (Tárnyiková 2009: 62) While the above quotations have a more or less direct relation to the surrounding text and/or context (even though they are within the non-constituents category), the following appears to be an independent stretch of a well-known song lyrics.

(59) We were partly singing, partly speaking the charming words, I may be right, I may be wrong/But I’m perfectly willing to swear/That when you turned and smiled at me/A nightingale... when Max broke off and said, ‘Was it Kumlinge?’ (ST, 67)

The lyrics are introduced in a way (‘charming words’), but as a colony, they are italicized in the original text and their syntactic organization appears to be typical of song lyrics (i.e. the use of slash to separate lines instead of regular punctuation). By inserting this colony consisting of song lyrics just before Max’s remark, the effect of contrast is achieved once again. While Serena was rhapsodizing about the romantic moment the two of them shared, Max did not hesitate to break it off to ask about the location of her former lover’s erstwhile residence. The lyrics come from a song called ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ which has been recorded by numerous popular artists and singers including Nat King Cole and it is interesting to note that the author does not mention the title of the song within the text. He limits himself to quoting the lyrics and stating that it is indeed ‘a famous song’:

(60) But a month or so later, we were sitting in Berkeley Square trying to reconstruct the lyrics of the famous song about a nightingale singing there.

(ST, 67)

The role of the text colony in the form of song lyrics excerpt thus may also lie in helping the reader to identify the song, should the vague description not suffice. This is yet another example of how extensive awareness is required on the part of the reader (see the chapter on Introduction and identification chains). Being a means of foregrounding, the hybrid quotations and their function in the text appear to be clearer when the focus is placed on the sociolinguistic aspect, i.e. who is talking to/about whom at particular points of utterances. ‘[…] many meaning choices in discourse reflect the social context of speaking in a rather direct and simple way.’

(Coupland 2007: 13) They help emphasize various aspects of various types of utterances - the examples include utterances towards former lovers, an interaction between a potential employer and employee, utterances that were only realized in the mind of the character (one directed at a mad woman, the other one to self), as well as a mocking quotation of a patient’s utterance by a nurse. Whether the particular utterances are supposed to mock or emphasize, the of lack quotation marks (and in some cases even the presence of italicization) contributes vastly to the final effect.

5.3 Indirect speech with wording in the form which resembles direct speech (reported quotations)

This category basically involves reported speech.

Novels are not plays, and more than direct discourse is required. Most novelists use a range of techniques to report the speech of characters. All forms of indirect discourse are characterized by the back-shifting of tense in the reported clause: thus the present tense becomes the past, the past tense the past perfect. (Black 2006: 67)

However, what is specific about reported speech in McEwan’s novels is the fact that even though reported, the form of it is very similar to direct speech, had that been used instead. As could have been observed above, the author lets the reader slide into the mind of the characters and this pattern also may be one of the ways to do it. McEwan lets us in on a lot of the characters' inner thoughts. This category could be in fact divided into two smaller subcategories. One includes sections consisting mostly of the characters’ thoughts – their inner dialogue, so to speak; the other includes parts in which there is an actual dialogue between some characters taking place but for some reasons it is not presented verbatim, exactly as it had happened.

5.3.1 Inner dialogue/unrealized utterances

Inner dialogue, thoughts and unrealized utterances occur in reported discourse as well. Let us look at an example from Amsterdam, where Clive ponders his relationship with Vernon:

(61) Put most crudely, what did he, Clive, derive from this friendship? He had given, but what had he ever received? What bound them? They had Molly in common, there were the accumulated years and the habits of friendship, but there was really nothing at its centre, nothing for Clive.

(AM, 65-66)

This example represents more or less rhetorical questions that the author reports, however, they are apparently questions that Clive asks himself. It is, in fact, a dialogue, one which is surely not unknown to any person, especially at times of trying to resolve an inner conflict or dilemma. It is a conversation between Clive and himself. Despite the fact that there is just one character in it, it is still a dialogue and is presented as such: it involves no quotation marks, but it still possesses a certain form, even though it is told in third person. The point of view, however, does not prevent the author from using the pattern which, incidentally, is used within the scope of the novels’ text quite frequently, especially the two that are told from the third-person point of view (Atonement and Amsterdam).

5.3.2 Reported quotations with a direct speech section at the end

As mentioned above, a typical feature of this subcategory is a pattern wherein a brief direct utterance is inserted at the end of a lengthy monologue. This strategy makes use of the contrast between direct and indirect speech, as if to show the contrast between the long and tedious and the important and stressed. A very good example comes from Atonement: Paul Marshall talks endlessly to Leon and Cecilia about his troubles and successes in the business of chocolate making.

(62) From his position between Leon and Cecilia, Marshall took control of the conversation with a ten-minute dialogue. He told them how wonderful it was, to be away from town, in tranquility, in the country air, for nine months, for every waking minute of every day, enslaved to a vision, he

had shuttled between headquarters, his boardroom and the factory floor. He had bought a large house on Clapham Common and hardly had time to visit it. The launch of Rainbow Amo had been a triumph, but only after various distribution catastrophes which had now been set right; the advertising campaign had offended some elderly bishops so another was devised; then came the problems of success itself, unbelievable sales, new production quotas, and dispute about overtime rates, and the search for a site for a second factory about which the four unions involved had been generally sullen and had needed to be charmed and coaxed like children; and now, when all had been brought to fruition, there loomed a greater challenge yet of Army Amo, the khaki bar with the Pass the Amo! slogan; the concept rested on an assumption that spending on the Armed Forces must go on increasing if Mr Hitler did not pipe down; there was even a chance that the bar could become part of the standard-issue ration pack; in that case, if there were to be a general conscription, a further five factories would be needed; there were some on the board who were convinced there should and would be an accommodation with Germany and that Army Amo was a dead duck; one member was even accusing Marshall of being a warmonger; but, exhausted as he was, and maligned, he would not be turned away from his purpose, his vision. He ended by repeating that it was wonderful to find oneself 'way out here' where one could, as it were, catch one's breath.

[…] Fortunately for him, Marshall was reaching his conclusion. ‘ ... where one can, as it were, catch one's breath.' (AT, 50-51)

The content of Marshall's monologue does not belittle or ridicule him as such. It is not actually the form but rather the length of his utterance that ends up making him look bad, boring and tedious. It should be noted that the last part of his utterance is repeated in direct speech and the author adds a very important word – fortunately. It may actually be the only word that the non-intrusive author allows himself to imply what he thinks about this characters and his behaviour. The end of the utterance in direct speech is the

part that the author wanted stressed, no doubt to emphasize how desired the end of this monologue had been and to ridicule the character of Paul Marshall even more. A similar example comes from Amsterdam. In a section where Julian Garmony's wife, Dr Rose Garmony, sets out on a mission to rescue her husband from public disdain. The scandalous photographs with Molly that Vernon decides to publish would have caused Garmony a drastic downfall.

(63) No, Mrs Garmony was saying, and she was glad to be able to put the record straight and make it clear that there was absolutely no foundation in the rumour. Molly Lane was simply a family friend and the Garmonys would always remember her fondly. Vernon was on his way across his office to turn the thing off when the surgeon was asked whether she had any particular message for the editor of The Judge. Yes, she said, she did, and she looked at him, and he froze in front of the television. 'Mr Halliday, you have the mentality of a blackmailer, and the moral stature of a flea.'

(AM, 124-125)

The above is nearly the same case as with the previous example from Atonement, only here the emphasized part that has been put into direct speech is not supposed to add to the character's humiliation (or, at least not the one that has uttered it). It is supposed to put a very resounding and solid period to what precedes it. The TV report about Dr Garmony as a great surgeon and a lovable, kind person is of no interest to Vernon. Neither is her explanation about the photographs and Molly. However, Vernon does realize the seriousness of the situation that her TV appearance caused. Her final words, her specific message to him, are put into direct speech precisely in order to create a contrast between what Vernon considers uninteresting and what finally makes him take her as a serious rival. To put it more precisely, direct speech at the end of Mrs Garmony’s reported utterance creates a line of demarcation between matter-of-factness and emotiveness. While what is reported is the exercised part full of pretense, aimed to achieve a desired effect, the direct speech part strives to hurt. ‘While direct speech purports to give a verbatim rendition of the words that were spoken, indirect speech is

more variable in claiming to represent a faithful report of the content or content and form of the words that were spoken.’ (Coulmas 1986: 6)

The following example from Sweet Tooth is also listed in category b), although it is somewhat different from the previous excerpts in one aspect: the direct speech section is much more extensive than the report that it follows. However, it still fits the criteria which have been laid out. Serena partly describes and partly quotes a letter which she received from Tom Haley, her potential protégé:

(64) He apologized for taking his time. He liked meeting me, he had given careful thought to my offer. He was accepting the money and he was grateful, it was an amazing opportunity. […] If you don’t mind, I’d like us to keep in regular contact - for two reasons. […] Best wishes, Tom Haley

(ST, 200 - 201)

The contents of Haley’s letter are reported by Serena up to a point where she starts the quote, which, as mentioned above, is quite extensive, and is another example of a text colony. In this case it seems quite evident that the author chooses the strategy as a means of foregrounding (or enlivenment). The reported section is the one in which Haley very diplomatically accepts the offer and thanks Serena, maybe even slightly exaggerates in order to achieve the impression of even more politeness. The section in direct speech (the quote) that follows, however, is what probably needs to be emphasized, as it is the part where Haley’s diplomacy subsides, he backs away from pure politeness and starts to dare to express some more personal sentiments. Reported quotations seem to be very widely used with McEwan - especially (but not exclusively) in the domain of rhetorical questions or, more precisely, characters’ inner thoughts. A special subcategory of reported quotations which are concluded with a direct speech section (introduced by proper quotation marks), on the contrary, is not a common one, but appears to be used in all three novels and contributes even more to achieving the effect of foregrounding (thus making the text more distinctive).

It is undoubtedly worth noticing that McEwan hardly ever passes any judgement on his characters’ utterances by using non-neutral introductory verbs such as claim (see introduction of the chapter) in order to steer clear from the responsibility and remaining as invisible as possible. The verbs he uses are rather neutral (e.g. say, tell…) and the goal of being ‘unfelt’ by the reader is achieved by simply letting the characters speak; even when their speech is being reported. The sociolinguistic aspect is of no less importance than in category a) - there are utterances directed from a complacent rich young man to a small contemptuous audience of friends, from a woman surgeon closely observed by the public to an equally public figure whom she takes for an enemy and from a smitten writer to a woman with a secret identity. Just like category a), a direct speech insertion at the end of a report makes the reader alert for crucial information and sets foundations for the relationships between the participants to be illustrated.

5.4 Discussion

The third and final strategy contributes no less to keeping the reader intrigued than the first two strategies that have already been discussed. It falls under two categories: a) hybrid quotations and b) reported speech resembling direct speech. Both categories involve patterns whose main role appears to be to distinguish (a significant aspect of this being the fact that it frequently helps determine smoothly who is talking to whom at which point, as well as distinguish actual discourse or utterances from what is taking place only in the mind of the characters) and contrast. Direct speech (whether regular or in the hybrid quotations) has proven to be a powerful tool of foregrounding/enlivenment or emphasis (and thus helping the contrasts), since the consumers of the text tend to perceive and remember these sections better than reported speech. On the other hand, lengthy monologues consisting of reported speech appear to have the opposite effect (which enables them to help stress some of the characters' features). Occasionally, there are verbs of saying (or ‘glossing verbs’) that the author uses, but he mostly applies such that help him remain detached, unnoticed, not held responsible, yet still gently forcing his views on the readers. Hybrid quotations (incorporated into the structure of a sentence) usually consist of no more than a few lexical units and often involve a shift in tenses. They occur in both formal and informal relationships and aside from the contrast, they give seriousness and

weight to sentences that are not physically uttered, but occur in the mind of the characters. There are multiple layers of discourse, operating at the same time. Reported quotations (indirect speech that resembles direct speech) are particularly interesting in case the author decides to insert a (usually emotionally loaded) direct speech section at the end of them. This also creates contrast between the lengthy, tedious and the important, expressive, and contributes to the creation of the effect of enlivenment.

Chapter 6 CONCLUSION

While I am always the first one to acknowledge and say that I can not claim to be certain of what the author of the text I have read had in mind and meant to achieve while writing his novels, it is undoubtedly safe to assume that any writer of fiction (including Ian McEwan) wishes to produce text that has the potential of raising and maintaining their readers’ interest throughout. Another well proven and well-known fact is that Ian McEwan and his fiction are immensely popular, not only among intellectual readers, but literally worldwide. That means McEwan has been able to achieve that goal and studying and analyzeding the text of the three selected novels written by him has shown some very intriguing effects that his stylistic choices have had. Therefore, the very basic hypothesis, as has been said, is based on the idea that the author (whether consciously or not) makes use of such stylistic devices/patterns that help him achieve that fickle, difficult ultimate goal of grasping the readers’ attention and managing to keep it until the very end of the story.

One of the things that make this possible to achieve is creating discourse between and among the characters that has a potential to resemble authentic speech (not completely, of course, as there is always a certain inherent level of stylization, but, in some aspects, to a rather considerable degree). It is certain stylistic devices that become one of the tools for the author to create the effect of authenticity, almost a movie-like feeling, enabling the readers to nearly feel like they personally are participating in the creation of the story or shaping of the characters’ discourse. Not to even mention that they help him create other significant effects as well. I have been attempting to focus on such stylistic devices that involve gapping, the word gap being defined by the Longman English Dictionary (2004) as ‘a space between two things’, or ‘something that is missing that stops something else from being good or complete’. In this case, gapping means omission, reduction as well as spaces (intervals, i.e., in fact, less lexical, grammatical or textual material than a full, complete text/sentence/utterance would have consisted of. As Wilson (2000) says, gaps are more difficult and challenging to the readers (Wilson 2000: 129), which means more effort is inevitably necessary, as well as preparedness and knowledge on their part, not to mention the ability of inference. That could easily become counter-productive, however,

my hypothesis relies on Leech’s Principle of Economy, claiming that when the author reduces and omits some of the grammatical, lexical or textual material, he does so not because he wishes to confuse the reader, but rather the contrary - in order to interest, intrigue them and generally apply the effect of enlivenment (synonymous with Mukařovský’s ‘de-automatization’, if I was to use his exact words). It was the Prague School’s Mukařovský, after all, who warned against the automatization of the text (Mukařovský 1964: 121). I have analyzed three selected novels by Ian McEwan: Amsterdam (1998), Atonement (2001) and Sweet Tooth (2012), ordered chronologically. All three of them include all the analyzed stylistic devices with the notable exception in the domain of introduction and identification chains, particularly the immediate detail summary subcategory, which occurs almost exclusively in Sweet Tooth. This is, to a degree, caused by the fact that the first two novels (Amsterdam and Atonement) are third person narratives, while Sweet Tooth is told from the first person point of view.

The first stylistic device that has been discussed is ellipsis and/or, for the lack of a better word, sentence fragments, which entail deletion of one or more parts of the grammatical structure of a sentence (predominantly verb phrases). It is presumed that (among other things) they are omitted in order to avoid unnecessary repetitions (Swan 2003: 172), thus contributing to the ultimate goal – the authentic feel of the conversation as a form of enlivenment. Bearing in mind Leech’s Principle of Economy, the assumption was that this pattern should not result in being counterproductive, but rather the contrary: using functional fragments and ellipsis should reduce the effort on the side of the speaker as well as the (sufficiently informed) hearer (or reader), which has proven to indeed be true. The ability of inference is therefore of vital significance here, but there are no ambiguities or problems with understanding on the part of the reader. It is a feature of the author’s style, as has been mentioned in the chapter on methodology (2.3), that he tends to nominalize frequently. He uses a large number of brief noun phrases/verbless structures as sentences (i.e. he deletes the rest of the grammatical structure, mainly the verb phrases, which is resulting in surface structure ellipsis, defined as such by the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2003)). The author does so not only in the three novels selected for the analysis, but also in other texts that he has produced and published. This strategy has an effect that may be

considered very desirable in the process of maintaining the readers’ interest. Occurrences of gapping as another subtype of ellipsis (not to be confused with gapping as a stylistic device in general) along with the surface structure ellipsis are not as frequent, but they do arise in the text. Using nouns or short noun phrases such as ‘Goldsmith’s, then Guildhall.’ (AM, 14) or ‘Our cover […], our bloody cover.’ (ST, 89), thus ‘freeing’ the utterance of all other lexical units but the most significant and resounding part, results in a neat effect of emphasis, usually of the characters’ powerful feelings or attitude towards the discussed matters. As Jeffries (2010: 22) says, nominalization also causes lower doubtfulness or questionability of the utterances, as the absence of the verb phrases makes them seem like given facts, so they are less susceptible to debate. The author is nearly equally fond of using repetitions and reiterations in elided forms. Although seemingly paradoxical at first, this pattern has proven to have a specific purpose which appears to also be emphasis of the repeated part of the utterance, expressing emotions and attitudes, such as in ‘Even your friend Shirley got one.’ ‘Even?’ (ST, 253-4), where the reiteration expresses strong sarcasm and even offense. Elsewhere, for example, it is the following exchange of introduction: ‘And this […] is Hart Pullman.’ ‘Hart Pullman. At last. […]’ (AM, 10), where the repetition of the name of the man being introduced undoubtedly signifies attempted flattery. Many of the occurrences of the ellipsis and fragments of this type could be categorized as echo questions as defined by Schirm (2009: 149). In addition to the above-mentioned effects of emphasis and expression of attitudes, there is another effect that repetitions and reiterations have that involves securing effective cohesive ties, perhaps best illustrated by the following excerpt: ‘[…] it’s been a way of not thinking about it.’ He said, ‘It?’ (AT, 133), wherein the word in bold is thus naturally emphasized and links the given utterance with the previous one, while the emphasis gives it a lot more meaning in between the lines than it conveys on the surface. The category of repetitions and reiterations is closely connected to the next one – the category of separated negation as intensification of meaning. It should be noted that many of the examples from the previous subcategory could also belong to this one. It involves ellipsis and separation of the section of the entire utterances that carries the negation from the rest, like in the following one: ‘I’ve seen the ABC figures,’ […] ‘Not good.’ (AM, 52) Again, this results in the emphasis of the separated part – the negative. Another similar example (‘Almost done?’ ‘Almost.’ (AM, 14)) is an ellipsis of an

already elided structure and the negative part is separated in both utterances. While the first speaker is obviously hoping for a positive reply, the word almost in fact becomes negative when the second speaker uses it in his answer. Given the context, the reader is aware that the reiteration helps the speaker of the utterance defy the one who is asking (they have a reason not to be especially fond of each other), however, it also still helps avoid an open conflict. There are some more interesting contrasts created by the separation of negation (such as ‘She’s a writer too. Commercial stuff. But not bad in fact.’ (ST, 299), which puts the words commercial and not bad on the opposite sides of the positivity/negativity scale, creating an implication that what is commercial is usually bad. It can be considered another method of conveying attitudes or opinions. Fowler (1986) claims ellipsis is mostly emotional and suggests intimacy, which is true for McEwan’s fiction too. In numerous cases, it is used to imply close relationships in the discourse between the speakers. However, I would like to point out that it is not always the case. Every now and then, ellipsis contributes to the briefness of the utterance and helps create effect that is opposite to closeness: distance, factuality, understandability (such as in the example where the police appear on the doorstep: ‘Police. C.I.D. Standing outside your front door. Appreciate a word.’ (AM, 144)). Therefore, a better way of putting it would be that ellipsis and sentence fragments are a tool that can help indicate the intensity of relationships between the characters, ranging from formal to close.

I have labeled the second analyzed stylistic device introduction and identification chains. It involves a phenomenon that I have decided to characterize as textual gapping. I have studied the chains from the points in the text where the name or other mention of a character or an object arises for the first time through the following ‘chunks’ of information that are a part of the character’s identification, i.e. what Martin and Rose call ‘relevant information’ about the person or object that is being talked about (Martin and Rose 2003: 158). The ways in which McEwan shapes the text to introduce and identify his characters can be divided into three categories: the strategy of gradual revealing, the unifying elements strategy and the immediate detail summary. They all can (and do) occur simultaneously. Gradual revealing of information about a character or an object involves first providing just a name and a few facts that are given or may be inferred from the context.

The readers are kept in the dark, which enables their overall inclusion in shaping of the story. It allows shifting the point of view and unfelt intrusion of an otherwise neutral, detached narrator. The gaps between the individual pieces of information vary from almost non-existent (see the above example from Amsterdam with Hart Pullman) to extreme, such as the introducion of a Cassius in the same text, with no information except for who it refers to. It is not until 72 pages later when the reader finds out it is a reference from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This degree of intertextuality requires not just the ability of inference, but above all, being well-read, informed and prepared. The extent of the gap/interval between the two mentions of the name by far exceeds the seven sentences that Firbas (1995) determines as the limit of the reader’s ability to remember or retrieve the necessary information. It is apparent that it is the effect of tension and suspense that is achieved by using this strategy. The ultimate goal of keeping the readers’ attention and interest is reached by revealing the story in front of them, thus allowing them help ‘shape the discourse’ (Urbanová 2013: 100), enabling the author to remain unfelt and seemingly neutral, while still imposing his attitudes on the reader who witnesses the story from various characters’ points of view. There are unifying elements in the texts of the novels (either within the story itself or intertextual references) that have a notable function in the domain of introduction and identification. These are especially useful when the reader is expected to be able to retrieve some information from the preceding parts of the story or from elsewhere. The unifying elements and the characters in the stories cannot exist without one another; therefore, the unifying elements are a crucial part of the identification of each character. The best example is Molly Lane, a character from Amsterdam – she is already dead when the story begins, yet she is being talked about throughout the entire novel and brings together not only the two main characters, but in fact most of the characters. Their identification is only complete with her. Intertextuality contributes to achieving the ultimate goal by making the story more real to the readers, as it involves references to real historical events or pop culture. The immediate detail summary is typical of Sweet Tooth, and it almost exclusively occurs in the text of this novel. When it is used, the identification chains involve a more or less detailed summary of either personal or biographical facts and/or a summary of the particular character’s relation to the story of the novel. As opposed to the gradual

revealing, so typical for the first two novels, this strategy is generous when it comes to providing details and information about the characters the very first time they are mentioned in the text. However, there is usually a gap after which a twist in the plot or a surprising ending occurs. The initial summary of details, whether they are related to the story or the personalities of the characters themselves, rouse the curiosity of the reader. This is perhaps best illustrated by the very first sentence of Sweet Tooth: My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service. I didn’t return safely. Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing. (ST, 1) The immediate detail summary does not rob the text of tension and suspense. Quite the contrary – although the key details are stated in a single paragraph along with the character’s name, while it even hints at how the story ends, the reader is left wanting to know more. Each of the introduction patterns helps create suspense in the story in a different way; some by revealing all of it gradually and postponing the crucial parts, other ones by condensing them and creating a gap between the summary of the information and the twist, thus helping the author achieve the ultimate goal.

The third (and last) stylistic device, hybrid quotations and reported speech, involves gapping in the sense of the omission of quotation marks. There are two categories: the first one involves direct speech incorporated into the structure of a sentence (strictly speaking, an ungrammatical phenomenon). The second one involves indirect speech that is worded in a way that is very similar to direct speech. Based on the fact that Eerland, Engelen and Zwaan (2013) say that direct speech makes the utterance more memorable than reported speech, the assumption is that direct speech with no quotation marks is inserted into the text to emphasize, yet still preserve coherence and cohesion, while reported speech similar to direct speech is used in order to demonstrate the tediousness and unnecessary length of the utterance in question. Resembling the literary technique of stream of consciousness, it also gives the impression of complicatedness. Direct speech incorporated into the structure of a sentence can be distributed into several categories, depending on the identity of the participants of the discourse (lover/lover, employer/employee, self to self/inner dialogue or soliloquy) and, like in

the following example from Sweet Tooth, it usually involves a shift in tenses: ‘I told him that [...] I looked forward to meeting Manfred one day, please let’s keep in touch, Goodbye! (ST, 19) The unrealized utterances, usually the characters’ thoughts, also belong to the category and are used to achieve the same effect (emphasis). There are multiple layers of discourse – or rather, contextually multilayered discourse operating simultaneously in the form of synergetic contexts, as illustrated by the following example: ‘My sons are brutes. They’ll kill me.’ He would have preferred to say, So be it, but instead he walked away and called over his shoulder, ‘I’ll talk to them.‘ (AT, 196) Many of the examples of this pattern could be classified as text colonies, which is a term coined by Hoey (1986) and it best fits the sections in the text that are not separated by the quotation marks and the meaning inference of which does not depend on the text that surrounds them. This is perhaps best exemplified by the quotation from a popular song in Sweet Tooth: A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square that is sung by the characters: the author only includes an excerpt from the lyrics, no title, which proves again how the degree of intertextuality places high demands on the readers. It also shows how all three of the studied stylistic devices can be used simultaneously. The second category involves indirect speech sections that are worded in a way that resembles direct speech, and fall into two subcategories. The subcategory of inner dialogue mostly includes the characters’ thoughts and ideas; however, it is presented in a way that allows the author (as well as the reader) slide into the mind of the character, be present to his/her thoughts as if they were uttered out loud. Reported quotations with direct speech section at the end are a largely special subcategory. They are not unique to any of the three novels, they occur several times in the text of all three and involve inserting a brief direct utterance at the end of a reported monologue, such as the on in Amsterdam, where Dr. Rose Garmony saves her husband from a very public downfall, soon to be caused by Vernon Halliday, the editor of an influential magazine. The author presents her lengthy, polite monologue, charged with positive emotions and aimed at gaining the TVviewers sympathy, and ends it with a short section of direct speech: ‘Mr Halliday, you have the mentality of a blackmailer, and the moral stature of a flea.’ (AM, 124-125) By using this strategy the author creates a powerful contrast, a line between what is a matter of fact (in this case, her formal, reported monologue for a TV interview) and what is emotive (the surgeon’s final message in direct speech, directed towards the editor). Elsewhere, it contributes to creating the contrast between the

boring, lengthy and tedious and the interesting or desired. Either way, it is a means of enlivenment (or foregrounding). Apart from gapping, being a means of enlivenment/foregrounding/de- automatization/defamiliarization is one thing that all three analysed stylistic devices have in common. While they all involve omission or reduction of explicit grammatical, lexical or textual material, they have proven to eventually express more than meets the eye and contribute to achieving the ultimate goal of most authors – helping the readers become part of the story as it unveils in front of them (shaping the meaning of discourse, i.e. bridging the gaps), maintain their attention and keep them interested till the very last line.

SUMMARY

The dissertation presents a stylistic analysis of the text and the characters’ discourse of three novels (Amsterdam (1998), Atonement (2007) and Sweet Tooth (2013)) by Ian McEwan, a British author, with the focus being placed on such stylistic devices and patterns that involve gapping, i.e. omission/reduction of lexical, grammatical or textual units, or intervals between the individual pieces of information in the text. The applied research methodology draws largely on the fields of stylistics, pragmatics, and to an extent, also sociolinguistics. The observed and analyzed stylistic devices involve ellipsis and sentence fragments (lexical level), introduction and identification chains (textual level) and hybrid quotations and reported speech (grammatical level). The research is basically aimed at finding out, determining and demonstrating how the author’s stylistic choices and patterns which involve gapping contribute to the creation of text/discourse that requires preparedness and the ability of inference, as they allow the readers’ participation in the shaping of the meaning and the story, thus eventually leading to the production of text that is enlivened (eventually achieving the ultimate goal of gaining and maintaining the reader’s interest throughout the text). The base of the hypothesis is the assumption that gapping as a stylistic device contributes significantly to the effect of enlivenment in the text. The theoretical framework is formed mainly by Mukařovský’s theory about de-automatization (basically synonymous with enlivenment) of the text and its effect on the consciousness of the text (1964), Wilson’s claims that gapping makes the text more challenging to the reader, but also Urbanová’s concept that highly stylized communication appers unnatural and that the involvement of the reader represents their own shaping of the meaning of discourse (2013). Each stylistic device described in the thesis is supported by excerpts from the three selected novels.

SLOVENSKÉ RESUMÉ

Dizertácia prezentuje štylistickú analýzu textu a diskurzu postáv troch románov (Amsterdam (1998), Atonement (2007) a Sweet Tooth (2013)) Iana McEwana, britského autora, so zameraním na také štylistické nástroje, ktoré zahŕňajú gapping, t.j. vynechávanie/redukciu lexikálnych, gramatických alebo textových jednotiek, prípadne intervaly medzi jednotlivými časťami informácií v texte. Aplikovaná metodológia výskumu čerpá prevažne z oblasti štylistiky, pragmatiky, a do istej miery aj sociolingvistiky. Pozorované a analyzované štylistické nástroje obsahujú elipsu a vetné fragmenty, (lexikálna úroveň), reťazce predstavovania a identifikácie (textová úroveň) a hybridné citácie a nepriamu reč (gramatická úroveň). Výskum je v podstate zameraný na zisťovanie, určenie a demonštráciu toho, ako autorove štylistické rozhodnutia a vzorce, ktoré zahŕňajú gapping, prispievajú k tvorbe textu/diskurzu, ktorý vyžaduje pripravenosť a schopnosť vyvodzovania, keďže umožňujú čitateľovi participovať na formovaní významu a príbehu, čím nakoniec vedú k produkcii textu, ktorý je oživený (čo nakoniec vedie dosiahnutiu primárneho cieľa, ktorým je získanie a udržanie záujmu čitateľa v rámci celého textu). Základom hypotézy je predpoklad, že gapping ako štylistický nástroj výrazne prispieva k efektu oživenia v texte. Teoretickú štruktúru tvorí hlavne Mukařovského teória o deautomatizácii (v podstate znamená to isté ako oživenie) textu a jej účinku na jeho uvedomenie (1964), Wilsonovo tvrdenie, že vďaka gappingu je text pre čitateľa náročnejší, ale aj Urbanovej koncept, že veľmi štylizovaná komunikácia sa zdý neprirodzenou a že zainteresovanosť čitateľa predstavuje jeho vlastné formovanie významu diskurzu (2013). Každý štylistický nástroj opísaný v práci podporujú úryvky z troch vybraných románov.

SOURCES and REFERENCES

Sources

McEwan, I. (1998) Amsterdam. London: Vintage. McEwan, I. (2007) Atonement. London: Vintage. McEwan, I. (2013) Sweet Tooth. London: Vintage.

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