A Narrative Study On Dramatic Monologue In Márai Sándor’s Portraits Of Marriage

Márai Sandor is a major Hungarian writer of the 20 th century,known as “the nurturer of the Hungarian national spirit” because of his unique style and reflective ideology.Among the many novels Márai wrote during his lifetime,Portraits of Marriage stands out for its unusual dramatic monologue narrative,which is rich in artistic and cultural appeal.The dramatic monologue in the novel is found in the dialogue of the characters and consists of free direct speech from their spoken language,but the words of the other party or parties involved in the dialogue are cut out of the textual discourse,so that the text becomes a place where the characters make their “monologue” and the story is told through the mouth of the monologue.At the same time,the monologist is not only the subject of the discourse,but also the object being represented in the story.As the character’s inner world is explored in depth and detail,and the subjectivity of the monologist is independent of the author’s subjectivity,creating a dialogue nature between the author and the character in the text.This paper analyzes the multiple dramatic monologues of Márai Sándor’s novel Portraits of Marriage,combining internal and external research to discuss its unique narrative form as a “significant form” that is interdependent with its narrations,trying to explore the organic combination of the novel’s narrative strategy and its ideological content,and further explore the connotation of its thematic purpose.This paper is divided into five chapters.The “Introduction” part introduces the origin and innovation of the topic,the current state of research on Márai Sandor’s literary works at home and abroad,the current state of research on the text “Portraits of Marriage”,the concept of “dramatic monologue” and its use in fictions.The first chapter,“The Multiplicity of Dramatic Monologue Focus”,begins with an analysis of the narrator’s form in the dramatic monologue of Portraits of Marriage,namely,the character’s first-person self-narrative as an intradiegetic narrator and homodiegetic narrator,and the way in which his or her communication with the silent but present listener is revealed.The second section on multiple focus builds on the first section on narrator morphology and begins with an analysis of the internal-focusing of the character’s first-person retrospective narration.The greatest role and effect of focus is the regulation and filtering of narrative information;and internal focus means limiting the information to the narrative to what the characters know.The retrospective narrative divides the character into two subjects,the narrating self and the experiencing self,and the perspectives of the past and the present alternate in the narrative,presenting the trajectory of the characters’ life changes in the story time and the trajectory of their psychological changes.The alternating perspectives of the temporal differences of the “two selves” portray the characters’ inner disillusionment and their tragic life experiences in the times.At the same time,the recollective nature of the retrospective narrative,as well as the character communication of the dramatic monologue,make the inner-focused filtering of information about past events differ from the truth of the events,creating an decietful internal-focused narrative,thus reflecting the psychological trauma of the characters as well as the complexity and faint of their inner world.Secondly,the four recollections of the four monologists constitute the multiple internal focus of the text as a whole,and the unreliability of the narrative of the internal focus of the single monologist is perceived by the reader through the extra textual unreliability of the multiple internal focus.However,the recollections of the four monologists are of the same status,and the facts are not disclosed and summarized from an authoritative point of view,forming a diffuse narrative directionality and truthless narrative effect,reflecting the collapse of unified moral ethics and the dissipation of ultimate values under the shocks of the times.The second chapter,“The Polyphony of Narrative Voices in Dramatic Monologues”,analyzes the multiplicity and dialogism of subjective consciousness in the text,based on the theory that voice is the sum of value positions and ideological attitudes in the text.First of all,the voices of the characters are the subjective consciousness of the characters,and the voices of the four monologists are independent,equal,and fully valued different voices,and the meaning of the text depends on the differential relationship between their ideas and the dialogue based on this differential relationship.The four monologists in the novel are set in a class counterpoint,namely,the citizen class versus the farmer class,the metropolitan versus the petty bourgeoisie within the citizen class,and the poor peasant versus the rich peasant within the proletariat.The differential dialogue formed by the class counterpoint not only constitutes the conflict between the monologists,but also invisibly conveys the author’s subjective thinking and constructs the theme of the novel.In the storyline,the alignment of the endings of the life and death of the four characters of monologues with different classes,the alignment of how the living live and how the dead die,then implies the author’s value orientation,i.e.,his concern about the two different social paths of totalitarian society and capitalist society.Secondly,two different psychological forces,rational and irrational,exist within the characters’ selves,and the dynamic psychological picture of the characters is spread out in the dialogue and game of different voices within the characters,portraying the split and struggle within the characters.The differential dialogue between the four monologuing characters and their self-divisiveness expresses the contradiction between the author’s traditional ideas and his rebellious thoughts,pointing to the author’s reflections on modernity with Eastern European characteristics.The third chapter,“The Variability of Narrative Time and Space in Dramatic Monologues”,analyzes the novel’s narrative time and narrative space,respectively.In the narrative time part,the temporal distortion of a single monologue is firstly reflected in the chronological inversion of the narrating act of the monologists and the time of the recalled story,and thus forms a temporal stratification between the outer“first narrative” and the inner “second narrative” of the story.The first narrative is characterized by the authenticity of story realization and narrative time convergence equivalence,while the second narrative is characterized by story time fragmentation and jumping.Fragmented,jumping time reversal is also known as flashback.The type of flashback used in the novel belongs to external flashback,and the time of flashback is the psychological time of the characters,there are several different time deformations of delay,pause and overview,with the subjective characteristics of psychological time,which expresses the psychological state of the monologists.Secondly,the four monologues are relatively independent but closely connected,and the novel as a whole,which is made up of four monologues,shows an explicit succession in story time.The novel as a whole takes the outer layer of the story which is the first narrative as the time structure framework,and organizes all flashback fragments against the chronological sequence in an orderly manner,which presents the tragic fate of the characters in a jigsaw puzzle,and strengthens the narrative strength in expressing the modern life experience of the characters.The second part,narrative space,takes the story space in the psychology of the characters presented by the dramatic monologue as the object of study,and focuses on the relationship between the characters and the story space,analyzing the coloring and interpretation of human perception,consciousness and emotion on the objectively existing space in the story,as well as the counteraction of the space on the psychology of the characters.It begins with the characters’ perception and narration of the social space of the city of Budapest and the social landscape of political and war violence in that space before,during and after the war,and its impact on the psychology and fate of the characters.Secondly,the domestic living space,as a psychospatial representation of the characters’ self-perception and individual history,is an effective way to understand the characters’ experiences,behaviors and inner world.The final section,“Conclusion,” outlines the need for psychological dissection of the dramatic monologue in the context of the state of society during a historically significant period of development.Portraits of Marriage is set in a similar historical period,where dramatic monologues are uniquely suited to presenting the complex dynamics of psychological division and dialogue.Its use in fiction is influenced not only by socio-historical factors,but also by the modern novel’s promotion of the“showing” method.Through the unreliable and untruthful sporadic narrative pointing between the narratives of four dramatic monologues,Portraits of Marriage empties the space of speech for all kinds of spiritual truths that are usually trapped by moral requirements,breaks the moral dilemma of “showing” narratives,and forms a multi-dimensional meaningful text for deeper reflection.