I’ve seen books in which the protagonist is an animal like a dog or a bear. I can’t be sure but maybe some of these have no dialogue.
I’m pretty sure there’s no dialogue in Tarka the Otter, but I don’t have a copy with me to check.
Also, Nicholson Baker’s two novels The Mezzanine and Room Temerature are all internal monologues, but they may have remembered dialogue in them (ditto on not having copies with me).
Large chunks of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are without dialogue, or faithfully reported dialogue anyway.
The main character in Johnny Got His Gun is unable to hear or speak, but there may be some dialogue in flashback sequences.
Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow, has no actual dialog in the grammatical sense, i.e., broken down into separate paragraphs with quotation marks.
People talk, but what dialog there is is incorporated into the general narrative:
And on for another page.
(Using this excerpt should not violate copyright, I hope)
Yeah, that’s it! Thanks for starting this thread and reminding me of the book. I’ll have to read it again soon.
I’m enjoying the thread for similar reasons.
Postcards, sorry that would count as dialogue.
The mention of animal books reminds me of another.
Big doorstop of a book, late 80’s, early 90’s. Blue whales barely surviving. Possibly after nuclear war, one of the babies is born without flippers. It finishes with just the barest hope that there may be a breeding female left on the other side of the world.
Any ideas on a title?
Bob Randall’s The Fan. It is all letters, notes, and telegrams the characters send back and forth.
Damn good book too.
Annie, these have come up before, Screwtape, Griffin & Sabine etc - although conducted by letter, they’re still dialogues between characters. I love them but they don’t fit. If anything, they’re the opposite of what the group’s after - there’s no narrative overview, it’s all a dialogue.
Wordman, picturebooks don’t count either sorry. I’ve tried getting them interested in things like The Arrival, but without much success.
jjimm’s link in post 13 describes it better than I did.
As though the characters have lost language (or never had it, as in the animals books). The novel is entirely descriptive.
It’s been some years since I tried, and failed, to read Madame Bovary, but I recall it as having very little dialog. Not quite zero, but pretty close.
Miguel Delibes’ first novel, Five Hours With Mario, won one of the most prestigious literary awards in Spain and has no dialogue at all, being the internal monologue of Mario’s widow as she stands watch before his casket.
Personally I like any other book of his a lot better (he’s one of my favorite authors except for this book), but it certainly is a literary tour de force.
I’m not sure I’d call Screwtape a dialogue between characters, because the only letters we are presented with are the title character’s. Wormword’s (the junior tempter/nephew) letters are alluded to, but never shown. Thus it’s more a monologue.
Lord of the Barnyard, Tristan Egolf
No dialog, and an amazing book.
What about short stories? I believe that Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Curse” includes no dialogue, though it does include the text of an inscription.
There are novels in which the protagonist spends a great deal of time alone (Robinson Crusoe is one prominent example, but there are plenty of others). There’d be long stretches of the book in which there was no dialogue because there’s no one to talk to. But I don’t know of any examples where there is zero dialogue throughout the entire book.
There was a short story in a dragonlance novel (a collection of short stories in the Dragonlance universe) that centered around a ‘knife’. I think the knife was trying to kill one of the major characters from the Dragonlance novels by Tracey Hickman and Margaret Wise (maybe Tanis?).
There was no dialogue that I can think of in it. It was something like 10 pages long though.
Cool suggestions - this question was based around a short story, so we know that can be done, but keep them coming.
Clarke’s “The Possessed” (about lemmings) and “History Lesson” (about aliens in the distant future trying to understand a Disney cartoon short) also have no dialogue IIRC.
Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men”?