Professional Documents
Culture Documents
In fiction, human
dialogue attempts to
marry logic to emotion
Types of Dialogue
SUMMARY: Can be part of the narrative, so that
much of the conversation is condensed.
Same people?
What dialogue can do
CHARACTER in dialogue – through VOICE.
Using particular diction (choice of words), or syntax
(word order in sentence) can tell things like class,
period, ethnicity, etc.
Eg: “I had a female cousin one time – a Rockefeller,
as it happened-” said the Senator, “and she
confessed to me that she spent the fifteenth,
sixteenth and seventeenth years of life saying nothing
but, No, thank you. Which is all very well for a girl of
that age and station. But it would’ve been a damned
unattractive trait in a male Rockefeller”
Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
What Dialogue Can Do
Eg: The Knight looked surprised at the question.
“What does it matter where my body happens to
be?” he said. “My mind goes on working all the
same. In fact, the more head downward I am, the
more I keep inventing new things. “Now, the
cleverest thing of the sort that I ever did,” he
went on after a pause, “was inventing a new
pudding during the meat course.”
“Sorry?” he says.
“The surgeon will speak to you,” the Radiologist says again. “There seems
to be something there, but the surgeon will talk to you about it.”
“My uncle once had something on his kidney,” says the Mother. “So they
removed the kidney and it turned out the something was benign.”
The Radiologist smiles a broad, ominous smile. “That’s always the way it
is,” he says. “You don’t know exactly what it is until it’s in the bucket.”
“It’s very appealing,” says the Mother. “It’s a very appealing way to talk.”
- Lorrie Moore, People Like That Are the Only People Here.
Dialogue As Action
Does the Mother feel differently about the
Radiologist after the conversation? Is there a
movement between how she was talking to him
at beginning of passage, and how she was
talking at the end?