/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20641247]

Are there any other authors who don't get inside of their character's head much like McCarthy? Who sort of just describe the scene as it is. Hemmingway seems like he would be this, but even though his prose is simple, a lot of it does concern the internal thoughts and musings of the characters in question.

[Anonymous No.20641288]

le monke

[Anonymous No.20641334]

Williams

[Anonymous No.20641346]

Is this most fiction before the 19th century. It's one of the reasons why medieval shit is so boring.

[Anonymous No.20641369]

>>20641346
>Williams
Which one
>>20641346
If anything, the 19th century is full of it.

[Anonymous No.20641383]

>>20641346
That’s not true, there’s plenty of dealing with characters’ internal states in pre-modern works, it’s just that those states are much less complicated and more reliant on tropes when compared to those of characters in modern fiction. The idea that a story could be told in the way OP describes is a modern thing in itself, probably born of Imagism and/or maybe even inspired by film.

[Anonymous No.20641414]

>>20641369
John Edward Williams I suppose

[Anonymouṡ No.20641559]

>>20641247
Dashiell Hammett is absolutely the boy for this. He has an unbreakable rule never to describe directly any character's internal state. Sometimes we can see he really wants to, but he always finds another way to impart the required information:


The Levantine bent forward in his chair. He failed to keep eagerness from showing in his eyes and voice. "I can be quite prepared to give you the money at, say, half-past ten in the morning. Eh?"

Brigid O'Shaughnessy smiled at him and said: "But I haven't got the falcon."

Cairo's face was darkened by a flush of annoyance. He put an ugly hand on either arm of his chair, holding his small-boned body erect and stiff between them. His dark eyes were angry. He did not say anything.

The girl made a mock-placatory face at him. "I'll have it in a week at the most, though," she said.

"Where is it?" Cairo used politeness of mien to express skepticism.

"Where Floyd hid it."

"Floyd? Thursby?"

She nodded.


— The Maltese Falcon

[Anonymouṡ No.20641630]

>>20641559
Lots of other "hard-boiled" writers copy Hammett. James Ellroy is a good example.

In literary fiction sometimes it's done (or partly done) by roundabout means. One quite common method is to have the story told in first-person by someone other than the main character. For example:
— The Great Gatsby. We never know for sure what Jay Gatsby thinks or feels, only what Nick Carraway guesses or imagines about him.
— One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. We never really know what's going on inside McMurphy's head; we only get Chief Bromden's thoughts (whether insightful or insane) on the matter.

Sometimes it's done in a gimmicky way, e.g. J.R. by William Gaddis, which is told almost entirely in dialogue. (You could say that plays do it, because all we get is dialogue & action, but that's not quite true. Shakespeare's soliloquies are basically a convention whereby the audience gets to hear what a character is thinking.)

[Anonymous No.20641640]

>>20641247
Why would anybody do that? Exploring the human mind is what made literature great.

[Anonymous No.20641700]

From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man drinking. A faint path led from the road to the spring. Popeye watched the man, a tall, thin man, hatless, in worn gray flannel trousers and carrying a tweed coat over his arm—emerge from the path and kneel to drink from the spring. The spring welled up at the root of a beech tree and flowed away upon a bottom of whorled and waved sand. It was surrounded by a thick growth of cane and brier, of cypress and gum in which broken sunlight lay sourceless. Somewhere, hidden and secret yet nearby, a bird sang three notes and ceased. In the spring the drinking man leaned his face to the broken and myriad reflection of his own drinking. When he rose up he saw among them the scattered reflection of Popeye's straw hat, though he had heard no sound. He saw, facing him across the spring, a man of under size, his hands in his coat pockets, a cigarette slanted from his chin. His suit was black, with a tight, high-waisted coat. His trousers were rolled once and caked with mud above mud-caked shoes. His face had a queer, bloodless color, as though seen by electric light; against the sunny silence, in his slanted straw hat and his slightly akimbo arms, he had that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin. Behind him the bird sang again, three bars in monotonous repetition: a sound meaningless and profound out of a suspirant and peaceful following silence which seemed to isolate the spot, and out of which a moment later tame the sound of an automobile passing along a road and dying away. The drinking man knelt beside the spring. "You've got a pistol in that pocket, I suppose," he said. Across the spring Popeye appeared to contemplate him with two knobs of soft black rubber. "I'm asking you," Popeye said. "What's that in your pocket?" The other man's coat was still across his arm. He lifted his other hand toward the coat, out of one pocket of which protruded a crushed felt hat, from the other a book. "Which pocket?" he said. "Dont show me," Popeye said. "Tell me." The other man stopped his hand. "It's a book." "What book?" Popeye said. "Just a book. The kind that people read. Some people do." "Do you read books?" Popeye said. The other man's hand was frozen above the coat. Across the spring they looked at one another. The cigarette wreathed its faint plume across Popeye's face, one side of his face squinted against the smoke like a mask carved into two simultaneous expressions. From his hip pocket Popeye took a soiled handkerchief and spread it upon his heels. Then he squatted, facing the man across the spring. That was about four o'clock on an afternoon in May. They squatted so, facing one another across the spring, for two hours. Now and then the bird sang back in the swamp, as though it were worked by a clock; twice more invisible automobiles passed along the highroad and died away. Again the bird sang.

[Anonymous No.20641702]

>>20641700
Sanctuary by Faulkner