He awoke punctually at oh-four-hundred hours, as he always did “in the field” (and that was what he called the maneuvers) His valet was already standing in the room. And the equerries, he knew, were already waiting outside the door. Yes, he had to start his day. He would have scarcely a moment to himself all day long. To make up for it, he had outwitted all of them that night by standing at the open window for a good quarter hour.

– from THE RADETSKY MARCH by Joseph Roth.

Kaiser Franz Joseph’s interior monologue. And Roth makes me see more clearly that the phrase “interior monologue” refers to the dramatic – to the monologue – and that when it is practiced well, as it is here, brilliantly, you can feel the point-of-view of the character as if it’s spoken.

The idea is taken from drama, of course. Or it takes from the same thing from which drama takes. From spoken language. Almost all Roth’s narration is one form of interior monologue or another. It’s like people are always speaking, even when silent. Saying things like “Yes, he had to start his day.” It’s the I-voice without the monotony and selfcenteredness of the I.

Maybe all the bad monologues I keep writing belong as fiction narration. Maybe this is how I get into fiction, by thinking of all narration as monologue. Because if I don’t know who’s speaking, I don’t know how to write. My short stories all turn into plays. That’s fine. Some day a play will turn into prose.

“Sir,” says the Colonel, “I hope it is not your practice to measure and estimate gentlemen by such paltry standards as those. A man of letters follows the noblest calling which any man can pursue. I would rather be the author of a work of genius, than be Governor-General of India. I admire genius. I salute it whenever I meet it. I like my own profession better than any in the world, but then it is because I am suited to it. I couldn’t write four lines in verse, no, not to save me from being shot. A man cannot have all the advantages of life. Who would not be poor if he could be sure of possessing genius, and winning fame and immortality, sir? Think of Dr. Johnson, what a genius he had, and where did he live? In apartments that, I daresay, were no better than these, which, I am sure, gentlemen, are most cheerful and pleasant,” says the Colonel, thinking he had offended us.

– from THE NEWCOMES, by W. M. Thackeray

Why have I waited this long to read more Thackeray? I only picked up THE NEWCOMES in the Ravenswood library because it had illustrations by Edward Ardizzone, who I have loved since seeing his illustrations of Eleanor Farjeon’s THE LITTLE BOOKROOM when I was a kid. Little did I know how good it was going to be. I find myself slowing down in deference to the density of Thackeray’s writing. I’m going to have to start over again from the beginning and read it at the pace of a snail – but what a happy snail. I think I’m going to enjoy this as much as the time when I was in Berlin and I decided to read every novel Thomas Hardy had ever written.

If authors sneer, it is the critic’s business to sneer at them for sneering. He must pretend to be their superior, or who would care about his opinion. Besides, he is right sometimes; and the stories he reads, and the characters drawn in them, are old, sure enough. What stories are new?
[…]
There may be nothing new under and including the sun; but it looks fresh every morning, and we rise with it to toil, hope, scheme, laugh, struggle, love, suffer, until the night comes and quiet. And then it will wake Morrow and the eyes that look on it; and so da copa.

– from the first chapter of THE NEWCOMES, (entitled “The Overture”) by W.M. Thackeray

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily, perhaps not possibly, chronological.

The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow.

– Eudora Welty, ONE WRITER’S BEGINNINGS