The inner speech of a character as a way of penetrating the “imaginary” into the “real” (based on the material of the story by M. L. Kashnitz The Straw)

The article deals with establishing the specific role of inner speech in a literary text as a tool for introducing the unreal into the real world, based on the example of the short story by M. L. Kashnitz The Straw. The authors rely on the idea of speech positions in the heroine’s internal dialogues with the absent or potential interlocutors; on the concept of active silence, which in fact means the actualization of the heroine’s idea; on the idea of restructuring the essence of the “I” in a complex process of autocommunication. The authors of the study use the continuous sampling method, the linguistic analysis of the text itself and the method of literary analysis of the literary text. The research aims to reveal the role of inner speech in changing how the character perceives the reality, in the penetration of the “unreal” into the “real”. The content of the forms of monologue and dialogue of inner speech in a literary text is analyzed in detail. Special attention is paid to the diversity of addressees in internal dialogues, the choice of which, as the analysis shows, most often has an extremely negative effect on the self-perception and self-esteem of the main character, destroying her “self”. Associative series, comparisons with inanimate objects that arise in intrapersonal communication as a result of qualitative transformation of the message are revealed, for example, a comparison with a straw scarecrow symbolizing everything obsolete and gone. There is an increase in the depersonification of the heroine of the story, which also occurs through reconsidering and restructuring of the system of personal pronouns, where the basic pronoun of the inner speech “I” is replaced by the indifferent pronoun “she”. The heroine loses her “self”, loses individual traits, and the “imaginary” approaches the “real”.