‘There are all sorts of lives’: Internal dialogicity within first-person narration in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark

Abstract

Studies examining the dialogicity of fictional consciousness within novels have tended to predominantly focus on third-person narratives or free indirect style. Fewer studies have engaged with the first-person mode, for such narratives are often considered to be confined to one viewpoint. Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark is predominantly related through the protagonist’s, Anna Morgan’s, first-person narration; however, Rhys interweaves a multitude of other voices within this mode, creating a dialogic tension with the external viewpoints expressed. Through the representation of differing perspectives in conversation with one another, Rhys demonstrates how individual consciousness is not isolated but shaped and constructed through interaction with the ideological viewpoints of others. The cacophony of voices engaging in dialogic discourse within the protagonist’s consciousness destabilises the boundaries between self and other, between public and private discourses. While Voyage in the Dark is a first-person autodiegetic narrative, through a detailed analysis of linguistic mechanisms, this study highlights the strategies of dialogisation (repetition and echoes, the blurring between private and public discourse, double-voicing, and enacting external viewpoints) employed within Anna’s first-person narration to create a sense of divided consciousness. By investigating how Rhys has employed linguistic devices and effectively utilised modes of consciousness (particularly the interior monologue) to present differing worldviews through one consciousness, this study also exemplifies the relevance of Bakhtin’s concept of dialogicity to first-person narratives.