o A wonderful example is from part 6 of Tolstoy’s $QQD
.DUHQLQD, at the start of chapter 5, in which two minor
characters, a middle-aged man named Sergei Ivanovich and a
middle-aged woman named Varenka, are picking mushrooms
in the forest. Each is in love with the other, and not only is
Sergei working up his nerve to ask for Varenka’s hand, but
Varenka is expecting him to propose at any moment.o At the crucial moment, Sergei loses his nerve. Instead of
proposing to Varenka, he asks her the difference between
two types of mushrooms. With that question and Varenka’s
response, both characters realize that the marriage will never
take place. Perhaps the most heartbreaking feature of the scene
is the fact that the dialogue has nothing to do with what’s really
on the characters’ minds. They’re thinking about love, but
they’re talking about mushrooms.o Even though the dialogue itself does not actually address the
matter at hand or directly express any of the repressed emotion,
it’s crucial to the devastating effect of the scene. In fact, the
scene would not work without it. What makes the scene work
is that the intensity of the characters’ private emotions is
immediately juxtaposed on the page with their banal statements
about mushrooms.z Such oblique use of dialogue has become even more subtle in
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Nobel Prize–winning Canadian writer Alice Munro. Her story “Walker
Brothers Cowboy” is about a married salesman named Ben who takes
his two children with him one day into rural Ontario, where he stops at
the house of a woman named Nora whom he hasn’t seen in years.
o The story is narrated in the present tense by the man’s daughter,
but the voice is clearly that of an adult looking back on a
situation she didn’t understand when it took place. Near the
end of the story, Nora plays a phonograph record and makes
the narrator, Ben’s unnamed daughter, dance with her. Nora
then stands in front of Ben and asks him to dance.