Literary Dialogue Exercise

        For this exercise I chose dialogue from “Lavande,” by Ann Beattie. This stretch of dialogue takes place between the story’s protagonist and her daughter Angela, as they discuss her former engagement to a man named Steven Stipley and his family. 

One key characteristic of this conversation is that the narrator is operating under a false premise, believing the woman she met in Rome to be Steven’s mother, rather than Donald Stipley’s mistress. Thus the reader learns the truth about Lavande at the same time as the narrator. One principle for literary dialogue I gathered from this excerpt is the need for each character conversing to have a “stake” in the conversation. In this story, the narrator is questioning her daughter (with whom the relationship is already troubled) and defending Lavande, in a case of mistaken identity. Her daughter is justifying her assertions about her former fiance and defending them against her mother’s protests. Because of the mother-daughter relationship’s troubled past, the consequences for this conversation are heightened, as the outcome could affect their relations for some time. Unlike the conversation I overheard and transcribed, this conversation discusses roughly only one subject, with more and more information being revealed and tensions rising until the climax, shortly after which the conversation ends. In this way this section of dialogue could be seen as a microcosm of the plot as a whole. The lines of this dialogue seem to be longer than would feel natural in real life, and they are broken up with character description and action like the collaborative process of making coffee, so the importance of the lines previous can sink in, as well as to give character insight. However, this dialogue is similar to real-life conversation in the frequent interrupting speakers, with interjections and refutations that eclipse the previous speakers words. Because of the emotional distance between the story’s characters, they do not have much shared history to reference or relate to, unlike the real-life conversation, which was littered with references to people and places unknown to me. 

The dialogue from “Lavande” is successful because it captures the character and tone of its speakers. Angela has only been described by the narrator, but the dialogue gives more information about her character with her whip smart tone and derision towards her mother. The narrator has engaged in direct dialogue only once previously; from her way of speaking we gain more knowledge about her character, including her formal, complete sentences and adherence to proper grammar even in argument with family, both of which speak to her self-admitted “stuffiness.”