Speech metaphors as a method to intensify heteroglossia in Dickens's “Dombey and son”

The article analyses the function of metaphor in dialogues of heroes in the novel “Dombey and Son”. We try to specify metaphors’ effects, to reveal connection between the stylistic method and the inherited features of metaphor as a speech model drawing on M. Black and the cognitive theory. Being a model of speech that represents a speaker’s way of thoughts and his relations with others, metaphor serves as a device for cultivating speech’s specification and detecting hero’s ability for communication that is to speak understandable and to understand the partner in answer. Metaphor complicates speech consequently the process of constant mutual orientation of languages, modes and intonations described by M. Bakhtin is going more extensively. For one or even both heroes metaphor appears as a language of the other, i. e. barrier in communication. This barrier the heroes overcome in different ways. The article considers the dialogues with metaphors that are fostered by three types of Dickens’s usual characters. These are sensitive and soulful heroes, hypocrites and cranks. For the first group metaphor is a way for sincere pronouncing and to recognize their mental and moral proximity. Hypocrites hide behind metaphors, borrow the discourse of the other and play with the help of it. Cuttle who is a crank then although uses metaphorical language demonstrates the lack of language’s self-consciousness, and this lack makes him strange. Carker appropriates artificially Cuttle’s language and defeats the captain at the level of language and the level of plot. The function of specific stylistic devices in the cultivation of heteroglossia was treated before, but in dialogues of heroes was not considered.