| dc.description.abstract | The aim of the article was to present a method of the analysis of the literary character through the observation of the style of inner monologues in the novel Henryk Flis of 1908 by Stanislaw Antoni Muller. Comprehending the style as personality expression is justified by the theories of cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics (discussed in the first part of the work), and is concluded with a hypothesis that differences in style reveal individual thinking styles, differences in knowledge and in the mental representation of the world. “The inner monologue” as a result of a strategy chosen by the writer and aimed at creating an illusion of a direct transference of psychic content occurring in the “mind of the character”, is defined as the character’s ability to relate the content of mental processes (verbalisation), a possibility of arriving at or avoiding “the truth about oneself’. The protagonist becomes a domineering factor of the presented reality, whereas its remaining components are “filtered” by his consciousness. Characterisation is focused on the way the experience is verbalised and it is aimed at identifying general convictions of a given character which construct his or her subjective vision of the world, and also at recognising their impact on the process of interpreting protagonist’s own behaviour and the conduct of other characters.
The notions of “perception present” and “meditative awareness”(introduced by Laurel Brinton, a researcher of English literature) were used in order to study a variety of inner monologue forms, from the stream of consciousness to apparently indirect speech, reflecting the process of direct visualisation of sensual experience and thoughts evoked by or associated with the situation that affects the awareness of a literary character - in an apparently indirect speech. In stylistic analyses there were distinctions of types of experience conceptualisation (Jacek Suchecki’s proposals discussed in the second part of the work): labelling, metaphoric categorisation; sentential categorisation, which is a maxim or proverb used in a monologue, which an internalised knowledge about a typical course of events (cognitive script); mythical categorisation with references to the cultural tradition.
The created model of the analysis of the inner monologue style in Muller’s pseudo- biographical novel made it possible to confront the world vision, which was created in the mind of the young character by modernist literature, with the provincial reality of Rokomysz, where Flis arrived at as a clerk. The surroundings perceived with a bias by him under the influence of moods, initiated associations and thoughts to order experience according to the Young Polish “style of perceiving the world”, because the motivation of these monologues “deforming” Rokomysz reality and announced each time by the narrator are Flis’s literary ambitions. “Grotesque of life” turned out to be a cognitive pattern that explains, and also expresses, an impossibility of the reconciliation of conflicts that are inherent in the structure of human personality. Young Polish rhetoric became a source of reality falsification. Expressionism was revealed not only on the stylistic level of inner monologues, but also in the construction of the character, in whom two world visions were confronted, which led to his psychological disintegration. | en_EN |
