because I was bored of perestroika

On quotation marks —

Perhaps no single emblem better epitomizes the perversity of my colleagues than the lowly quotation mark. Some rogue must have issued a memo, "Psst! Cool writers don't use quotes in dialogue anymore" to authors as disparate as Junot Díaz, James Frey, Evan S. Connell, J.M. Coetzee, Ward Just, Kent Haruf, Nadine Gordimer, José Saramago, Dale Peck, James Salter, Louis Begley and William Vollmann. To the degree that this device contributes to the broader popular perception that "literature" is pretentious, faddish, vague, eventless, effortful, and suffocatingly interior, quotation marks may not be quite as tiny as they appear on the page.

By putting the onus on the reader to determine which lines are spoken and which not, the quoteless fad feeds the widespread conviction that popular fiction is fun while literature is arduous. Surely what should distinguish literature isn't that it's hard but that it's good. The text should be as easy to process as possible, saving the readers' effort for exercising imagination and keeping track of the plot.

[...]

The refusal to make a firm distinction between speech and interior reflection can also evoke a hermetic worldview. Explaining why she writes without quotes, British novelist Julie Myerson asserts, "In my experience of the world, there are no marks separating out what I think and what I say, or what other people do." Yet when the exterior is put on a par with the interior, everything becomes interior. What is conveyed is an insidious solipsism. When thinking, speaking and describing all blend together, the textual tone levels to a drone. The drama seems to be melting.

From WSJ, Oct 25, 2008

OK, I thought this was slightly relevant to what we know about literary techniques and more importantly, the meaning they create and their effects on the reader. I have an issue with the merging of the interior monologue and outward speech because it confuses me to no end, never mind the soi-disant "hermetic worldview" it underscores and the conveyance of more realist attitudes towards the cyclic nature of time in relation to our self-awareness blah blah blah. Personal idiosyncrasy aside, is this useful in creating further levels of meaning? Is this creation of ambiguity a means to broach the idea of arbitrary and nebulous postmodern realities? Hmmmmmm