Voices And Interplays Working In The Dramatic Monologue

As a particular poetic form in English and American literature, the dramatic monologue consists entirely of a speech made by a first-person speaker, and features a speaker other than the poet, presence of a silent audience and self-revelation of the speaker.Although the dramatic monologue is a one-sided conversation, it entails three voices: voice of the speaker, voice of the audience and voice of the poet. Among these three, the voice of the speaker is what the dramatic monologue directly presents to the reader, whereas the voice of the audience is usually implicitly conveyed through the speaker's reflections, reckoning and remarks on the audience. As for the voice of the poet, though the poet deliberately effaces himself to achieve impersonality and objectivity, his voice is always present, as we can tell from the manner of writing, say, arrangement of images, variation of tone, syntax structure and rhetoric devices.Due to the unreliability of the first-person narration, absence of the poet, and open structure adopted by the dramatic monologue, the reader is granted great freedom in interpreting the dramatic monologue; at the same time, however, the reader is confined by the mere facts provided by the speaker's statements. Based on the illustrations of the dramatic monologues since the Victorian Age, the author makes a systematic and analytical study of the sextuple interplays within the speaker, the audience, the poet and the reader working in the dramatic monologue, endeavoring to solve how these interplays are realized.