Hello all
In non-fiction works, is common – indeed, it’s practically expected – to find passages of prose interspersed with quotations. Short quotes are simply placed in quotation marks, while longer ones are set in their own paragraph, often in italics and with narrower margins.
I’m curious to know if there are any works of fiction that use a similar device, incorporating quotations (whether real or invented) into the body of the text in this manner. Plenty of novels use quotations as epigraphs, and some may even utilise techniques such as footnotes, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this done in this style, and I wondered whether anyone here has come across anything of this nature?
Thanks in advance.
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Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders uses lots of very short quotations from different perspectives to build up a picture of a particular time in Abraham Lincoln’s life. The whole novel is written in a strange epigraph style, even in dialogue between fictional characters, but it seems to have derived that style from the quoting of actual non-fiction sources for a sense of consistency. I’m not convinced it works overall, but it’s an interesting experiment in form.
Good call. I’d forgotten that literary device he used so well.
Check out A. S. Byatt’s Possession.
It’s about 2 modern academics researching about the love life of 2 famous fictional Victorian poets. Numerous diary entries, letters and poetry are interspersed throughout the novel.
House of Leaves might fit the bill. It’s a pretty controversial book, on this sub. People tend to either love it or despise it.
I thought it was fantastic. The book is almost like a documentary in novel form. Sorta. Kinda.
The Friend, Sigrid Nunez