Dialogue: Credibility versus Realism in Fictional Speech

This chapter focuses on dialogue, which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as ‘a conversation carried on between two or more persons; a colloquy, talk together’. The OED definition also goes on to point out that there is often a tendency to understand the term dialogue as referring to speech between two persons, ‘perhaps through associating dia- with di-: cf. monologue’. My use of the term dialogue, then, incorporates duologue, the term for conversation between two persons specifically. Monologue, on the other hand, may be understood as ‘a long speech by one actor in a play, film, or broadcast programme’, as ‘a scene in a drama in which only one actor speaks (opposed to chorus and dialogue)’ and as ‘a dramatic composition for a single performer’(OED). In this chapter, my comments about dialogue apply equally to monologue....