Non-personal direct speech in Evgeny Vodolazkin’s novel “Brisbane”

Abstract

   This article studies non-personal direct speech as a means of artistic expression in modern Russian literature. The text of the novel “Brisbane” by the popular writer Evgeny Vodolazkin was selected for our analysis. The novelty of the research is the study of its expressive syntax. The widespread use of non-personal direct speech in this work allows us to draw a number of important conclusions regarding the place of reception in the space of a literary text. Note that non-personal direct speech helps to convey the attitude of the characters to each other and to the events described, and also reveals the author’s standpoint. Uncertainty, that the words were uttered, blurs the boundaries between what was said and what was not, which transfers phrases into the field of mental comprehension of the world. In some examples, non-personal direct speech is an imitation of the flow of real time in an artistic space, it allows you to convey intonations of live, oral speech within the artistic text. Non-personal direct speech can form a monological and a dialogical unity and serve as a means of informing the reader about the described object. As frequent linguistic constructions that form non-personal direct speech in the novel “Brisbane”, one can name plug-in constructions, rhetorical questions and rhetorical exclamations. In general, the use of non-personal direct speech in the text increases the expressiveness of especially significant episodes and enhances the rhetoric of the statement.