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The Floating “I”

By On January 20, 2012

This is one of my favorite techniques.  It was employed by W.G. Sebald in The Emigrants. It is used to drift from one 1st person point of view into another 1st person point of view.  And it’s not as simple as it sounds.  For one thing, he doesn’t use quotation marks to demarcate dialogue.  Also, paragraphs come rather infrequently, so it’s not as simple as indenting.  He uses a couple of techniques to do this.  Here’s one:

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