Ophelia's Nun

Oh, Penelope recognised him alright, through the beggar's guise. It was his ever so overcoded way of leaning forward in that chair Eurynome had brought up for him, for a start. And it was his way of wanting his old body to seem humble enough to deny the comfort of the seat's fleece cover. Oh, and the misty teared eyed taking in of the glow of the megaron hearth. This all showed her the great cunning mind of Odysseus at work. True, the scabbed knees, the black grimy ragged loincloth, the sunken chest with uncurled, white hairs, and the matted white beard, uncombed and as patchy as a vagrant's diet, spoke of twenty years of hardships fighting in Troy and making some unconscionable trail back here to his palace. But she wasn't stupid. The waste of his limbs, the gutwrenching sickness in his breath, and his untouchable fingernails were all the neat poetic authorship of Athena scripting the glorious return in hiding of the beggar king.

It wasn't his looks now that rankled. It was the deep echo of the touch of Antinoos that she knew now in the whisperless chambers of the palace. It was the sight of her golden weave in near completion beneath her cloister window. That beggar's prodigal narrative of nostos could be nipped in the bud. Was there a way of making this not inevitable, while escaping the fate of Clytemnaistra, her tactless cousin, murderer of Agamemnon?

Oh, but then she heard the stranger speak, head down, broken but with his uncanny voice, sonorous, twenty times the breadth of his ragged breast: "Lady, your fame goes up to heaven". The syllables exploded into dream memories of showered hibiscus and lotus petals reflected one June morning in her sunshine skin and golden hair that he said he would love, would love, would love forever and that surged in her heart to return that yes, oh she would love, she would love: Oh, no, would she renew her vow, now? Oh, a voice, a mouth of flowers, and I am undone, undone.

Here's an exercise I've set. Anyone like to try it?

I'd like you to attempt a short piece of prose narrative featuring a character called Penny who is in a dilemma. The nature of her difficulty, you can choose entirely for yourself. What I'm really interested in here is to ask you to explore the possibilities of representing Penny's consciousness. However, your main constraint is that Penny must always be referred to in the third person. She is not the narrator even though it is her thought being represented.

I'd like you to take note of the following:

When a third-person, "omniscient" narrator plunges into the consciousness of a character and represents their thoughts but still in the third-person, this technique is called focalization.
And there are different levels of focalization. Used to great effect, the narrator can display a particular level of empathy with a character, for a different effect. Let me demonstrate how this works.

A character's quoted monologue, "Have I wasted my time in this job all these years?" would, in focalization, be converted to the third person and the past tense, using for example the following three techniques:

1 She wondered if she had wasted her time in her job, all those years. This sentence is an example of what is called psycho-narration. The narrator is reporting indirectly the character's thought, changing the pronoun and tense, and substituting the demonstrative adjective "those" for "these".

2 Had she squandered her time by remaining in that occupation for all those years?: This sentence is an example of narrated monologue. Note that there's no phrase such as "She wondered" in this example to identify the prominence of an obtrusive authorial narrator here, which means we have greater emphasis on the character's thoughts, without any additional narratorial reportage. However, the language used is more writerly than in the character's own quoted monologue, so we say that here is an example of narrated monologue of the dissonant kind.

3 Had she wasted her time in his job, all those years? This is narrated monologue of the consonant kind, because though it phrases the character's thought in the third person and switches tense, it is the closest kind of focalization we have seen to the original example of quoted monologue quoted above.

Example 3, and, to an extent, example 2, are known in linguistics as free indirect discourse. Such discourse is 'free' because it's not preceded by phrases such as "She said" to make it reported speech that emphasises the narrator's standpoint; it's indirect because it's not a first person utterance.

So, I'd like you to produce a piece of work which shows all three kinds of focalization mentioned above, in operation.

And please do make sure to have good fun at attempting this exercise. I hope it will benefit you!

A politician seeking re-election on a principle
is like a barroom drunk networking the other drunks
frantically rushing from table to table keeping them apart
making sure they don't get together and compare notes
to find out that he didn't really get to go out with the pretty girl
that she's never heard of him
and that he's been making it all up
these four long years