ABSTRACT
Two of the extracts used in the first unit – Money and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – are written in the first person; that is, the main character is telling the story from their point of view and of course using the ‘I’ form. This viewing of events largely through a character’s eyes is called an internal point of view. We may not experience everything they do but events are mostly seen through their eyes, with an insight into their thoughts and feelings and often with comments on the situation. Extreme forms of this internal view would be the kind of writing which attempts to duplicate a running internal monologue of someone’s loosely associated thoughts, also referred to as stream of consciousness writing. Some of Virginia Woolf’s novels are composed in this style, as well as some of the writing in James Joyce’s Ulysses. The absence of punctuation helps to intensify the sense of this being rather like someone’s loosely associated thought, as in this made-up example:
yes he said oh yes penalty penalty yes yes yes I can’t look he said I can’t oh Dicksy yes Dicksy you can do it oh god make him do it yes come on you irons oh yes Dicks please yes oh yes
