Characterization Through Conversation

Since Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, her works and the genre of short fiction have attracted much critical attention. Owing to the highly economical and concise nature of short fiction language, the development of living and feeling characters within a limited span of pages cannot be achieved without the utilization of conversation. Munro’s short fictions are rich in conversation. However, critical reviews on Munro seldom put conversation in the center of their discussion, let alone the relationship between conversation and characterization. Moreover, conversation analysis as an approach to understand daily conversation, is much less adopted in literary studies.In this paper, I propose to study the role conversation plays in characterization, and demonstrate the practicality of applying conversation analysis to studies on constructed dialogues in written form. This paper takes on Munro’s stories laden with conversations as its database. Turn-taking system, conversational structure, and topic shift management under the framework of conversation analysis are applied in this study. The focus of the study is on the particular strategies deployed in the conversation and their relevance to characterization. The emphasis is on how the conversation is presented, rather than what is said in the conversation. The specific aspects of conversation taken into account include the selection of the next speaker, turn size and turn distribution, interruption, the production of adjacency pair, sequence and pre-sequence, types of repair, and topic shift.The interplay between conversation and other contextual clues are noticed, and some replicable and recurrent patterns in these aspects are found in the presentation of certain types of characters. It is discovered that the frequency of self-selection, the length of turn span, and the occurrences of interruption reveal whether one is domineering or being dominated; the conversational structure, from basic adjacency pair to the global structure, involves the manipulation of the preference organization and discloses features such as cunning, stubborn, or vulnerable; the ability to introduce new topic and perform topic maintenance exhibits the amount of power that character possesses. The intricate relationship between conversation and characterization is thus uncovered. This paper demonstrates that conversation not only enhances specific features, but also brings out traits that are absent in other means of characterization. Through the analysis, Munro’s skillful techniques of characterization through conversation are also demonstrated. Though the same conversational strategies can be deployed by any kind of characters, drastically different characteristics are shown depending on situational cues such as the characters’ relationship and the context. Each utterance in dialogue demonstrates the author’s skillful exploitation of conversation to make characterization believable. This study is an enrichment to stylistic analysis, as it adopts conversation analysis in the discussion of characterization. In the meantime, the study also contributes to the readings of literature, as the important role conversation plays in literary texts are highlighted through examples and discussions.