Dialogue In The Minimalist

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Honestly, I re-read “The Minimalist” three times, and I still don’t have good answers for all these questions, so I apologize in advance. I didn’t connect with the story, and I know that it’s an artistic choice, but I don’t like reading a story in which dialogue conventions are broken throughout the whole thing. It’s harder to “see” someone’s speech and connect it to their character when it’s not offset. For me, at least, it is. I wish the dialogue was indented, paragraphed, and quoted, but it is not. Call me a silly little rule-follower - it’s okay. It wouldn’t be the first time. The characters in “The Minimalist” are mainly the owner of the studio, Peter, and the narrator. Peter seems to truly care for her, bringing her food and making …show more content…

Through speech, we see how the mom and dad interact with one another and how the son interacts with his parents as well. There are a lot of lines of dialogue, as the story is much longer than anything else we’ve looked at in this class, and Ben Marcus uses all of it to his advantage by creating his characters largely by how they speak (or don’t) to one another. In the opening, Jonah says, “You told me to tell the truth, and I’m telling the truth. I. Don’t. Love. You.” This sets the story in motion and sets the tone for what is to come. Later on, the reader sees how mom and dad interact with one …show more content…

His silence is just as telling. This story is very dramatic with the main character erupting frequently, his wife sleeping on her own, and Jonah saying he no longer loves his parents.
“The Minimalist” is not dramatic at all, in my opinion. It’s mainly set within the main character’s head, and she spends a lot of time thinking about the color blue. Not exactly dramatic. A clip from that story illustrates this nicely: “Sometimes I opened my eyes and pictured blue as a well, a cool, mammoth glacier of it advancing across the floor” (154). The whole story is almost tranquil to the point of there being no drama. The action is brought forward in “Cold Little Bird” when Jonah subtly threatens his father with turning him into the school’s counselor. You can almost see the bond between father and son ripping as he says, “I’d rather not have to say anything about you and Mom. At school. To Mr. Fourenay.” Finding this forward action through dialogue in “The Minimalist” is much harder. The narrator say, “I told him I’d failed” (157). From there, she feels like a fraud, quits, and walks off into the sunset. A lot of the story is not told through dialogue, though. I’m curious how everyone else will answer this

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