<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>The narrator of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko not only claims privileged access to what we might now call the eponymous protagonist's “inside story,” but works to validate that claim by invoking evidence drawn from the inside—by describing physical specimens conveyed from Surinam to England as empirical proof of its wonders, for instance, and by experimenting briefly with psycho-narration and free indirect discourse in an effort to provide a perspective on Oroonoko's state of mind from within his own consciousness. Yet this narrative investment in accessing interior truths is haunted by Oroonoko's fruitless struggle to plumb others’ hidden motives; indeed, his self-evisceration serves as a grisly commentary on the narrator's effort to extract some deeper inside story from her interviews with Oroonoko—to “draw the Nobler part, the Soul and Mind.” In Behn's hands, free indirect discourse does not so much render other minds visible as reveal insuperable barriers to knowing what another thinks and how another feels, barriers previously adumbrated by the text's insistent attention to the dubious reliability of both linguistic and nonlinguistic media of communication.</jats:p>
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