In the introduction to this work I touched on Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'Hospitalité française, which describes his experience as a psychologist working with immigrant patients in France. He explains the change in the patients when they realized that their interlocutor believed their accounts of phantom-like physical pain:

Through this passage, it is evident that silence can be performed, not only by the speaker, but also by the listener. If the listener does not take seriously what they hear, in essence, the voice goes unheard in favor of different sounds (or narratives) privileged by the listener.

Ben Jelloun suggests that we have a moral duty to listen that is part and parcel to the moral duties to feed, clothe, and give shelter to our fellow human beings (13). However, as Ben Jelloun demonstrates throughout L'Hospitalité française, he listened to the voices of immigrants due to a range of motivations: professional, intellectual, political, and personal. What happens when such motivations to listen fall away? While it may seem an obvious point, it is important to make clear that silent, marginalized voices signal not an absence of voice, but the absence of a motive or desire to listen on the part of those who stand closer to the center.

In two literary works that came out of the French feminist movement and early postcolonial social awareness, exposition rendered through reflections of the character, from whose point of view the scene takes place, ‘interrupts’ people speaking or thinking. In other words, in these passages, thought trumps voice.