STYLISTIC FEATURES OF INDIRECT SPEECH IN ROBERT WALSER’S NOVEL “THE ASSISTANT”

Abstract

The article investigates the functioning of indirect speech in the Germanlanguage literary text on the basis of a comprehensive philological analysis of R. Walserʼs novel “The Assistant” and considers the peculiarities of lexical, syntactic and stylistic means of its implementation in terms of the individual creative style of the author. In order to determine the ways of transmitting anotherʼs speech, we have analyzed the narrative and character speech microstructures of the novel. It was found that the narrative plan of the text is created by a combination of auctorial and personal narrative situations, which adds semantic ambiguity and ironic tone to the artistic speech of the novel. According to the subtypes of indirect speech proposed by W. Schmid, it was established that “The Assistant” uses “free indirect speech”, which differs from indirect speech in violating grammatical and syntactic norms of its use and allows to reproduce character’s speech while maintaining its stylistic features. The analysis of constructions with indirect speech showed that the use of interjections, exclamations, colloquial and emotional vocabulary, characteristic of the speech of a particular character, leads to the stylization of the narratorʼs speech and denotes the implementation of the “free indirect speech” in the novel. It was also shown that the indirect way of transmitting personal speech in the novel allows the narrator to focus on what is to be ironized, and selectively reproduce the content of the conversation, leaving some of the statements of the characters out of consideration. With the help of “free indirect speech” and quoting foreign words, the narrator expresses his ironic attitude towards the engineer-inventor Karl Tobler, whose depiction of the gradual financial collapse is the plot line of the novel, and ridicules the behavior of his assistant Joseph Marty for obedience and thoughtless pursuit of his master’s ideas. Within the personal narrative situation, the life of Tobler is ironically depicted from Joseph’s perspective, while the perspective of the auctorial narrator determines the drama and ironic unfolding of the plot-event plan of the novel. The results of the study of intratextual communication in the novel “The Assistant” confirmed that the combination of perspectives of the auctorial and personal narrator, the way of transmitting personal speech in the form of “free indirect speech” and quoting foreign words contribute to the communicative-pragmatic effect of the text, which arises as a result of the authorʼs ironic position on the development of the plot line and the characteristics of the characters.