Defoe’s psychological realism: The effect of directness in indirect consciousness representation categories

Abstract

Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies represent the life of an individual through personal memories. Although he has often been associated with circumstantial realism rather than psychological realism, Defoe in fact represents the psychological as well as social and economic realities of his characters. In Defoe’s first-person autobiographical narratives, the person who narrates (i.e. the narrating self) and the one who experiences (i.e. the experiencing self) share the same pronoun, ‘I’, which exhibits a fluctuating internal tension between the two selves. This article aims to investigate Defoe’s psychological realism in terms of this internal tension, focusing on the narrative techniques for representing consciousness in which the points of view of the two selves are mingled. The representation of consciousness by means of what is called free indirect speech and thought (FIST) is under development in the early eighteenth century. In Defoe’s fictions, however, the internal tension between the two selves is abundantly indicated by his use of FIST and his handling of directness (the-experiencing-self-oriented deictic and expressive elements) within indirect representations of consciousness (indirect speech and thought (IST) and narrator’s representation of speech/thought act (NRSA/TA)) and within narration (N). The analysis demonstrates that, like FIST, direct elements used in indirect consciousness representation categories show the narrating self’s empathetic identification with the past self, which simultaneously evokes the reader’s empathetic feelings towards the psychology of the experiencing self. It consequently reveals that the creation of empathetic effects through directness helped Defoe to represent the psyches of individuals in remembering as in real life.