The way people speak has a profound impact on the creation of a sense of place and geographically-specific identity. From a posh British accent to an American southern drawl, these patterns are deeply connected to place and often tell readers about the characters themselves, including their personal history, their interconnection with specific places, and the deepest parts of their identity, including who they are, what matters to them, and how they perceive and interact with the world around them. In King’s Dolores Claiborne (1993), the entire novel is told in the unfiltered narrative voice of Dolores herself, with elements of speech and dialect that clearly mark her as a Maine island woman. 

The context of communication always matters and in Dolores Claiborne, Dolores has come to the Little Tall Police Station to tell her story and clear her name following the death of her elderly employer Vera Donovan. Dolores’s tone and words are brusque and no nonsense, dismissive of the formal structures and expectations of the standard police interview: she’s here to tell her story and tell it she will, in her own way and in her own time. With the opening words of the novel, Dolores overtly challenges the expected script, setting the tone for all that will follow when she says “What did you ask, Andy Bissette? Do I ‘understand these rights as you’ve explained em to me’? Gorry! What makes some men so numb? … No, you never mind—still your jawin and listen to me for awhile. I got an idear you’re gonna be listenin to me for most of the night, so you might as well get used to it” (19, emphasis original). As far as Chief Andy Bissette is concerned, there is a certain pattern that these interviews are supposed to follow and rules that ought to hold, but Dolores is having none of them. 

Readers never hear this directly from Bissette himself, though, because Dolores’s is the only voice in Dolores Claiborne. She speaks to and interacts with the other people in the room—Bissette, Officer Frank Proulx, and stenographer Nancy Bannister—but readers have to interpret these words through their absence. The opening conversation between Dolores and Bissette sets this pattern: we know Bissette is speaking to Dolores and what he is saying based on her responses, but we never actually hear his words. He remains an absent presence on the page. While most of the novel is immersed in the story Dolores is telling, these interactions regularly pull the reader back to the present moment and context, whether it’s Nancy asking Dolores to speak up in crucial moments or Dolores asking Bissette for a knock of the Jim Beam he keeps in his desk. Similarly, when Dolores recounts conversations from years past, these conversations are in her own words, shaped by her own perspective and memories, though her own recollections similarly reflect the speech patterns of those with whom she speaks, from Vera’s upper-crust formality to Selena’s fearful stiffness and Joe’s petulance and his often drunken, vulgar language. 

Dolores’s words and way of speaking are Maine through and through, with her language painting a rich and evocative picture of place, much like Jud Crandall’s Downeast “ayuh” in Pet Sematary (1983). Her informal tone, abbreviated words, and colloquialisms all contribute to this interconnection of words and place, and her deep investment in both. Through the gaps in her storytelling in which she listens and responds to her interviewers and through her telling of conversations with other people, Dolores’s speech patterns are indirectly contrasted with those around her, establishing hers as a singular and unique voice. There are some distinctive Maine-isms and a shared language heritage, but not everyone on Little Tall Island speaks like Dolores. These tensions are largely invisible but never far below the surface, reflected in interactions like Dolores’s refusal to abide by the expected structure of the police interview, her navigation and rejection of the formal conversations with the bank manager and Vera’s money manager, and her peripheral comments on Joe Junior and Selena’s respective professional languages (politician and magazine writer, respectively) that both build upon and transcend the language of their childhood home. Dolores chooses the language and communication that work best for her, that most authentically reflect who she is, and that most effectively facilitate her telling the story she needs to tell. 

The novel’s first-person stream of consciousness style immerses readers in Dolores’s perspective and in Little Tall Island, with the flow of her language echoing the flow of her daily life. This informality lends an intimacy and immediacy to the story she tells, particularly as she recounts Joe’s murder. Her frustration and powerlessness at finding out about Joe’s abuse and his closing of the children’s college fund accounts, as well as the ferocity with which she protects Selena and the guilt she feels about not having seen what was happening earlier on all put the reader in Dolores’s position. Even as she tells Bissette and the others how she killed Joe, confessing to premeditated first-degree murder, she maintains a forthright honesty, telling her story the way it demands to be told and refusing to apologize for the choices she has made. 

The intimate and immersive tone of Dolores’s narration is also crucial in navigating the complexities of perspective in the story she tells. She both loves and hates Vera Donovan, knows that she and Vera have very little in common but are very much the same. From a more removed perspective, such as third-person omniscient, these contradictions would be more challenging to reconcile. But told through Dolores’s voice and in her own words, as well as her recollection of Vera’s words, these intricacies are more easily navigable, colored with the emotions and losses shared between the two women. 

Much like the structure of the novel itself, Dolores and Vera’s relationship is punctuated and shaped by what is said and what remains unsaid, the truth within the lie and vice versa. Vera is the one who tells Dolores that “An accident … is sometimes an unhappy woman’s best friend” (189).

“Are you sayin—” I begun. I was able to get a little above a whisper by then, but not much. 

“I’m not saying anything,” she says. Back in those days, when Vera decided she was done with a subject, she slammed it closed like a book. (190, emphasis original) 

While in this case, there is truth and power in what Vera says, there are also instances in which what she says hides the darker, silenced realities that she cannot bear to face, as she tells Dolores that her children Donald and Helga are alive long after they have died. Dolores reflects on the dissonance between the spoken and the unspoken, thinking that “She told me all sorts of things with her mouth over the years … but I realized that ever since the summer of 1962, her eyes’d been tellin me just one thing, over n over again: they were dead. Ayuh … but maybe not completely dead. Not as long as there was one scrawny, plain-faced housekeeper on an island off the coast of Maine who still believed they were alive” (356, emphasis original). 

There is a similar tension in the conversations Dolores has had with Selena since her daughter has moved off of the island. They never speak of Joe’s sexual abuse, with Selena’s calls and letters sticking to more general subjects, but when Dolores speaks with Selena on the phone, her daugther’s words are often slurred, a slight detail but a powerful indicator of all that remains unspoken between them, including Selena’s potentially repressed memories of her father’s abuse and her suspicions about her mother’s role in his death. 

In a “Scrapbook” section in the final pages of Dolores Claiborne, readers learn that Selena is coming back to Little Tall Island for the first time in over twenty years. This information comes from an unlikely direction, through an excerpt from a chatty local paper piece, which reflects none of the traumatic complexity of the reality that lies beneath, and is an abrupt shift from the informal and transparent authenticity of Dolores’s words throughout the novel. Dolores cryptically says “We’ll find lots to talk about, I’m sure” (372), but readers have to wonder. What will be spoken of and what will remain silenced? Should some things remain unspoken and buried? What will the cadence of that language sound like and where will Dolores and Selena’s mannerisms clash? Where and how will they mirror one another, tied together by family, place, and trauma? In the end, the context and intimacy of this communication reasserts itself and while we know Dolores well by this final page and can anticipate how she might speak and what she might say, those words—whatever they may be—are for Selena alone.

[Page numbers are from Signet paperback edition of Dolores Claiborne]