While down a literary rabbit hole the other day, I came across the famous Jaws monologue --- in print, not a video clip, lest you should (ahem) unjustly think I was watching YouTube instead of doing the writing I was supposed to be engaged in. I was struck by how well that monologue is structured and presented. … you know, it’s the one where crusty old shark-hunting Captain Quint really opens up for the first time and presents Hooper and Brodie (and us, the audience) with a human side of his personality no one has suspected he actually possesses. Then --- okay, I admit it --- I did go to YouTube and watch it… all four minutes or so that it takes Robert Shaw to masterfully deliver it, complete with a little ironic smile as he calmly and slowly makes his way through a pretty horrific experience. And I thought, man, that’s a damned fine piece of writing (and let’s not forget the delivery, because Shaw takes a spellbinding narrative and imbues it with understated horror). The fictional Quint is deftly inserted into the real-world event of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, an American warship which delivered the nuclear weapon components to the island of Tinian in the Pacific Ocean so they could be assembled and placed on the plane which eventually delivered them to Hiroshima. After leaving Tinian, the Indianapolis was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine, and the classified nature of the mission meant it wasn’t listed as overdue for several days.
So, yeah, the monologue… which, as I used to tell my students, is a fairly lengthy speech made by a story character to do one of several things. It can create an emotional experience, relate a past experience which explains something exceptional about a character, examine some deep philosophical issue relating to the human condition we all share… the list is almost endless. Note it’s not an information dump. That’s something else entirely, and much less entertaining. Some monologues are soliloquys, which means the character involved is really just thinking them --- but on stage or in film, it would look pretty damned boring if Hamlet just stood there for four minutes, frowning, chin in his hand. So Will had Hamlet state his thoughts aloud, putatively to himself, but practically for the watching audience. Soliloquys aren’t really that much of a stretch, you know, because, let’s be honest, raise your hand if you’ve ever talked some thorny problem through with only yourself physically present in a room? Hey, you in the back… yeah, I’m talkin’ to you… come on, put yer hand up. You know you’ve talked to yourself, too. Monologues are soliloquys with an audience… like the aforementioned one delivered by Captain Quint. They’re well worth looking at strictly from a writing point of view, too, because Quint’s monologue gives us huge dollops of information about why he is the way he is and why he will later in the tale react the way he does; it also provides a fair amount of foreshadowing about his death. And it does it without being pedantic or preachy… just provides us with a gripping, raw tale of life and death in the Second World War.
Other famous monologues? Well, visually (and most appropriately, given the insanity going on in America these days), the masterful monologue from the series The Newsroom (created by the extremely talented Aaron Sorkin) about why America isn’t the greatest country in the world is another four minutes’ worth of amazing prose ruthlessly cutting through the (let’s be honest, here) smug self-congratulatory mindset a lot of Americans have about themselves (fewer nowadays, I rather suspect). Jeff Daniels plays a journalist who’s part of a panel and is asked to say, in one sentence (‘or less,’ the clueless university student says before she realizes the inanity of her words) why America is the greatest country in the world. Up until that point, he’s been determined not to say anything controversial, but is goaded into speaking the truth… and boy, does he let loose.
Literary monologues… well, of course, as a retired English teacher, I must turn to Will, because he wrote so many… and so many were great ones. Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy, for example, is justly one of the most famous in literature. I used to explain to my students that Hamlet, who is one of the great ditherer protagonists --- he spends much of his eponymous tale trying to figure out what to do --- is wondering in this soliloquy whether he should just kill himself and put a stop to all the endless machinations and misery his situation has brought him to. Then, later on in the play, he has another brilliant soliloquy where he decides to throw off all his indecision and embark on a clear course of (bloody) action. (It’s worth noting that when I read that one aloud to my students, I used to play the soundtrack from that scene in the 1995 Kenneth Branagh film version --- which always got me a round of applause from my scholars at the scene’s conclusion.)
Then there’s my obligatory LOTR reference of the day, though it’s from the film: a terrific monologue from none other than Samwise Gamgee, whom you wouldn’t expect to have too many erudite philosophical musings buried in his ample frame. There’s something similar in the book, but these words are really Jackson’s, not Tolkien’s. When protagonist Frodo is deep in despair at the prospect of them ever successfully ridding the world of the malevolent One Ring, Sam makes a rousing monologue about how evil is transient and better times are coming. He concludes by saying, “Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something. That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fighting for.” Well done, Peter Jackson.
Is the monologue a dying literary device? I don’t think so, necessarily. But it does require skill and sensitivity to write well, and in this age of quick, pithy one-liners, I’m not sure there are too many writers able to pull it off successfully.
It’d be a shame if it did wither away… there’s so much to be learned, and gained, from hearing a character deliver a good “friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears…”
So, yeah, the monologue… which, as I used to tell my students, is a fairly lengthy speech made by a story character to do one of several things. It can create an emotional experience, relate a past experience which explains something exceptional about a character, examine some deep philosophical issue relating to the human condition we all share… the list is almost endless. Note it’s not an information dump. That’s something else entirely, and much less entertaining. Some monologues are soliloquys, which means the character involved is really just thinking them --- but on stage or in film, it would look pretty damned boring if Hamlet just stood there for four minutes, frowning, chin in his hand. So Will had Hamlet state his thoughts aloud, putatively to himself, but practically for the watching audience. Soliloquys aren’t really that much of a stretch, you know, because, let’s be honest, raise your hand if you’ve ever talked some thorny problem through with only yourself physically present in a room? Hey, you in the back… yeah, I’m talkin’ to you… come on, put yer hand up. You know you’ve talked to yourself, too. Monologues are soliloquys with an audience… like the aforementioned one delivered by Captain Quint. They’re well worth looking at strictly from a writing point of view, too, because Quint’s monologue gives us huge dollops of information about why he is the way he is and why he will later in the tale react the way he does; it also provides a fair amount of foreshadowing about his death. And it does it without being pedantic or preachy… just provides us with a gripping, raw tale of life and death in the Second World War.
Other famous monologues? Well, visually (and most appropriately, given the insanity going on in America these days), the masterful monologue from the series The Newsroom (created by the extremely talented Aaron Sorkin) about why America isn’t the greatest country in the world is another four minutes’ worth of amazing prose ruthlessly cutting through the (let’s be honest, here) smug self-congratulatory mindset a lot of Americans have about themselves (fewer nowadays, I rather suspect). Jeff Daniels plays a journalist who’s part of a panel and is asked to say, in one sentence (‘or less,’ the clueless university student says before she realizes the inanity of her words) why America is the greatest country in the world. Up until that point, he’s been determined not to say anything controversial, but is goaded into speaking the truth… and boy, does he let loose.
Literary monologues… well, of course, as a retired English teacher, I must turn to Will, because he wrote so many… and so many were great ones. Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy, for example, is justly one of the most famous in literature. I used to explain to my students that Hamlet, who is one of the great ditherer protagonists --- he spends much of his eponymous tale trying to figure out what to do --- is wondering in this soliloquy whether he should just kill himself and put a stop to all the endless machinations and misery his situation has brought him to. Then, later on in the play, he has another brilliant soliloquy where he decides to throw off all his indecision and embark on a clear course of (bloody) action. (It’s worth noting that when I read that one aloud to my students, I used to play the soundtrack from that scene in the 1995 Kenneth Branagh film version --- which always got me a round of applause from my scholars at the scene’s conclusion.)
Then there’s my obligatory LOTR reference of the day, though it’s from the film: a terrific monologue from none other than Samwise Gamgee, whom you wouldn’t expect to have too many erudite philosophical musings buried in his ample frame. There’s something similar in the book, but these words are really Jackson’s, not Tolkien’s. When protagonist Frodo is deep in despair at the prospect of them ever successfully ridding the world of the malevolent One Ring, Sam makes a rousing monologue about how evil is transient and better times are coming. He concludes by saying, “Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something. That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fighting for.” Well done, Peter Jackson.
Is the monologue a dying literary device? I don’t think so, necessarily. But it does require skill and sensitivity to write well, and in this age of quick, pithy one-liners, I’m not sure there are too many writers able to pull it off successfully.
It’d be a shame if it did wither away… there’s so much to be learned, and gained, from hearing a character deliver a good “friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears…”
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