Hearing someone asking for a trope name and then realizing it's me

June 7, 2021 7:49 AM

Is there a commonly-accepted trope name for a viewpoint character hearing a generally-negative sound (screaming, groaning, whimpering, etc) and then realizing it's themself making that sound?

I ran across this sort of thing most recently when reading Brian Evenson's Immobility. There's that exact scene: our protagonist goes unconscious for traumatic reasons. He comes to, disoriented, he hears groaning or screaming. Then he realizes (dun dun DUN!): the person making the sounds is him!

I think this sort of thing crops up mostly in genre fiction, and it seems to be the prose equivalent of a blurry shot slowly focusing in with signifying muffled-tinnitus-sounds also resolving into clearer sounds. I've been legitimately surprised I haven't found anything on tvtropes that refers to it, and search-engine-ing outside of it has not been helpful, but I can't discount the search problem being between my keyboard and chair!

Is there an "official" name for this trope? Any articles or writing about it? Surely some writer used it first. Purely guesswork, but it seems like the sort of thing that would have got especially popular during pulp stories era (there are vague memories ringing a bell of running across it in some Doc Savage omnibus when I was a wee lad, but I couldn't testify to that).

posted by Drastic to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Best answer: I doubt there's an"official" name for something this specific, but going by TVTrooes it's similar to a Post Wake-Up Realization crossed with a (very mild) Tomato in the Mirror.
posted by Rhaomi at 9:11 AM on June 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

This question feels adjacent the notion of whether a given sound in a film is diagetic or non-diagetic.
posted by HeroZero at 10:37 AM on June 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

The classic story that this reminds me of is Edgar Allen Poe's "Tell Tale Heart. " I poked around a bit for tropes connected to that story, and I got some things about unreliable narrators, so that might be relevant.

This page lists all the tropes in "Tell Tale Heart."
posted by bluedaisy at 1:18 PM on June 7, 2021

I recall reading this in An Evil Cradling which is a non-fiction account of being held captive by terrorists in Lebanon. The author releases a scream while being beaten but at first doesn't recognize it as his own. I thought it was interesting that this is a non fiction account, so the trope is based on something that really does happen.
posted by PercussivePaul at 8:30 PM on June 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think it's only tangentially related to your question, but there's a scene in AM Homes' This Book Will Save Your Life where the main character starts having a chest pain and assumes he's having a heart attack so he calls 911 and in the ensuing minutes he starts asking himself if he's really experiencing something new or if he's just recognizing a feeling he's had for years or even forever and that his noticing it is what's giving it life and simultaneously allowing him to dismiss it.

I've had this exact experience and thought pattern during traumatic times (during a stroke, immediately after being hit by a car, etc.). The sense that you've been unaware of something your body has been doing can be overwhelming and very convincing.
posted by dobbs at 5:08 AM on June 8, 2021 [1 favorite]