How is The Ambassadors a psychological novel?

The impression that external stimuli and events make on a character or the thoughts and feelings motivating characters are the subjects of this type of fiction. In the novel's earliest days, the psychology of a character was declarative. Thus, the nervous mind of Robinson Crusoe was stated, as was the fear of death in Tristram Shandy. However, an increased interest in criminal minds brought greater psychological sophistication to the novel. Detective stories in America and Russia delved into psychological motivation and reflected current scientific theory. As the nineteenth century wore on, George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert produced psychological novels about normal people. In the twentieth century, following James, the psychological novel would reach new heights with James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.

James contributed the technique of sustained focus on one mind to this genre. James used a device called erlebte Rede or le style indirect libre, a technique that plays with indirect speech. A standard narration, which uses indirect speech to focus on the thoughts of a character, would judge a character's thought: "he thought [blank]." In erlebte Rede, however, the narrator leads us to the judgement but without the overtness just shown. In this novel, the narrator generalizes the sentiments of what Strether thinks by cutting through the literary and metaphorical manners Strether himself would use. The reader, however, has to reach the conclusions by him or herself. For example, the narrator does not clue the reader into the obvious irony of the phrase "in the same boat" at the end of the novel. Some things are better left unsaid, and the result is a focus on the workings of an individual mind as it deals with its environment.