(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

are there people who have their inner monologue in the third person?

i ask because i was reminded of this trope in TG fiction where the narration goes 'he thought it was about time he accepted his change and started think of herself as she' or something and then the narration switches pronouns as though this reflects a change in inner monologue and like. how. is this how the author's brain works.

(the general case of this is pretending the narration corresponds one-to-one with what's going on inside the PoV character's head, which is still weird in first person narration but much less so)

i am an actual trans person who thinks in two gendered languages and i can't even tell when i started switching adjectives from gendered-male to gendered-female in my Spanish inner monologue, the question of what third person pronouns i use inside my head for myself is meaningless

Comments

[brin_bellway]

...crap, I've had a similar conversation before and my friend JT responded that they *did* often think in the third person and went into a bit of detail on how it worked for them, now where *was* that post...

Found it! God, I love Siikr.

I see there's also a passing mention earlier in that thread of another_normal_anomaly "involuntarily narrating my life in my head".

[sigmaleph]

thanks for that link!

i'm pretty sure my thoughts about myself are too nonverbal for the question posed in that thread to have a meaningful answer, but I already knew that's not universal so I'm less surprised.

[lunartulip]

I can't recall ever having had thoughts of that format. When I'm using self-pronouns in my verbal thoughts, they're pretty consistently first-person, with the only exception I can think of not really fitting what you're after. (The exception is when I'm imagining non-me people [talking/thinking] [to/about] me and have them use second- or third-person pronouns to refer to me.)

[wingedcatgirl]

My internal monologue has a tendency to be in second person... I'm not sure how much of that is influenced by plurality vs influenced by Homestuck.

[contrarianarchon]

It took some effort to get myself disarmed about this thought enough to check in an unbiased way, but internal monologue is def first person.