ABSTRACT
To express a more extreme version of the provincial writers' dualism, Frame uses the devices of the modernist novel rather than those of the dominant realist tradition. Owls Do Cry's point of view is not the limited third-person perspective of Mulgan but a constantly shifting series of inside views, including Daphne's lyrical interior monologues from the mental hospital and the ironic first-person narrative of her sister Chicks' diary. The style is not the consistent and basically utilitarian prose of the realist novel but is poetic, imagist, allusive, and constantly changing. Frame's characterization does not rely primarily on speech and action supplemented by summaries of thought but on a relatively direct presentation of the inner life by free indirect thought and interior monologue. The plot does not recount a long, chronologically ordered causal chain of events but supplies the reader with a series of intensely realized inner experiences, often out of chronological order. The structure, too, is not purely temporal and linear but also "spatial," with recurring motifs and symbols reflecting back and forth upon each other. No New Zealand novelist before Frame had so exploited the devices associated with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Hyde had used some, especially in The Godwits Fly (1938), Owls Do Cry's most significant New Zealand predecessor, but not to the extent that Frame does.
