What I learned from "last class"

Roethke has successfully done what I have been trying to do for four stories. He does the no-quotations-dialogue, which makes it ambiguous whether someone is talking or thinking, blends inner monologue what’s going on in the story, and makes you sympathize with the character with its strong sense of first-person. His was appropriate and successful, while mine, as many of you have commented, often isn’t.

But now I have insight into why it sometimes work and sometimes doesn’t. I throw my no-quotation trick in with a vast menagerie of other literary devices, as well as actions and plot twists. Roethke’s, on the hand, takes up the entire story – it basically is the story. The entire piece is one big no-quotations trick.

Obviously, this serves to prevent confusion. There’s never time when you ask, “Is he speaking now, or thinking?” Secondly, his trick gets the opportunity to really blossom and make us laugh over and over again, because it doesn’t interfere with other things, ,or slow down what is happening.

Roethke’s story is not really a narrative in the conventional sense – there’s no story arc. He magnifies one single scene from the life of his character that probably played out in about 10 minutes. There are no actions that he has to rhythmically intertwine with his monologue. There is no grand theme that he must collectively point all of his dialogue in the direction of – the grand theme is inherently in the dialogue. He is not bogging down the story with his prose because there is no story to bog down.

And what little action does occur in the story, he pulls off through the dialogue: “As for you, Eulalea Mae – please rise when I name you individually.”

So he is free to insert as many jokes as he wants to. He piles them on top of one another, and they get better and better because they are so excessive. At no point do I yawn and say, “Where is this leading?” because I know it isn’t leading anywhere.

So that’s the lesson I learned from Roethke. If you are going to do the no-quotations trick, and blend inner monologue with verbal speech and action, inner monologue has to be a centric part of the project, if not the only part.