Films and television dramas are the dominant modes through which people experience narrative today. A single frame conjures the atmosphere of a world, and actors bring characters to life. Such media deliver immersive experiences which have emotional resonance for audiences, and they do it in an accessible and easy-to-consume way. There’s no need to pay close attention to tiny black marks on white paper; no need to translate black marks into mental images; no need to puzzle over unfamiliar words. So, is it a case of anything books can do, film can do better?
Not quite. There is something about writing. It can do something that film rarely achieves: render consciousness in a compelling and sustained way. What about using voice-over? you might ask. But that device has been widely discredited by film-makers and critics as an artificial tool that distances the audience from the visual story, which should speak for itself. By contrast, novelists — from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Bernardine Evaristo today — captivate readers by allowing characters to tell their own stories, thus making the narrative voice a main attraction. This article considers some of the ways in which prose fiction achieves this, drawing examples from Dubliners (1914), a short-story collection by James Joyce (1882–1941).
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