SOURCE: “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Point of View Analysis,” in Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. XIII, No. 2, 1971, pp. 165-78.

In the following essay, Rus examines some critical perspectives concerning narrative presentation in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, drawing attention to Solzhenitsyn's innovative use of “represented discourse,” interior monologue, and the Russian literary form called “skaz.”

In a very timely study¹ Dorrit Cohn has made an attempt to establish the term “narrated monologue” as the English equivalent of the French “style indirect libre” and the German “Erlebte Rede.” Cohn defines “narrated monologue” as “the rendering of a character’s thoughts in his own idiom, while maintaining the third-person form of narration”; the use of “narrated monologue” enables the author “to recount the character’s silent thoughts without a break in the narrative thread.”²

The choice of the term “narrated monologue” as against...