Oh Mrs. Dashwood is that a bottle in your hand?

Jane Austen and Flaubert used it: free indirect discourse. As Hills writes, free indirect discourse is a "language that comes from the narrative but takes the attributes of the character described." In the case of Flaubert, Madame Bovary say things that are sort of in the middle. She says things without directly saying them, and they aren't things said by the narrator. "Was Flaubert identifying with Emma's fantasy or merely reporting it?" That comparison takes us, of course, to the affinity (identification? possession?) we have with our avatar. Think of the avatar as a form of "ready-made or customized form of representation" and it becomes our voice, our interpreter in the virtual world we inhabit. And when we log off, isn't it still an abstraction we created? Every choice we make is an "indirect representation of the self." I think that the mere choice of not choosing something is already a choice, a way of saying something. Leaving something out is the same as putting something in.

Hills continues: "An avatar, to the degree the author sitting in front of the screen relies on a one-to-one correspondence between him or herself and the online icon, is often an actor with a closer, more direct persona-like relationship to the author than the multiple characters populating most novels." Well, perhaps that's going a little too far. But, yes, I agree that it is a persona, a representation of the author, anyway we look at it. He explains the ability that the graphical chat interfaces allow their authors to create a "halo of meanings." The way I see it, the avatar is a symbol of oneself, it is a fictional extension of the self. Hills talks about this "second skin" and writes that the "avatar, like the masquerade, reveals as much about the individual 'behind' it as it conceals."