Narrative & Time
Stichomythia
Dialogue traded in quick single lines, each speaker capping or reversing the other's words. The exchange works like fencing: every line answers the last.
The Hamlet–Gertrude closet scene exchanges.
Don't confuse it with. Ordinary quick dialogue lacks the line-for-line symmetry and echoed vocabulary that make stichomythia a formal duel.
In the Reader
No anchored excerpts yet — this device lives in the glossary but has not been marked in a passage.
The rest of the family
In Medias Res Prolepsis Analepsis Foreshadowing Free Indirect Discourse Stream of Consciousness