Free indirect speech is a style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech. (It is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or discours indirect libre in French.)
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Comparison of styles
What distinguishes free indirect speech from normal indirect speech is the lack of an introductory expression such as "He said" or "he thought". It is as if the subordinate clause carrying the content of the indirect speech is taken out of the main clause which contains it, becoming the main clause itself. Using free indirect speech may convey the character's words more directly than in normal indirect, as he can use devices such as interjections and exclamation marks, that cannot be normally used within a subordinate clause.
Examples
- Direct, or quoted, speech:
- He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And just what pleasure have I found, since I came into this world?" he asked.
- Normal indirect (i.e., reported) speech:
- He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the world.
- Free indirect speech:
- He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found, since he came into this world?
Usage in literature
The nineteenth century French novelist Flaubert is often cited as an early and influential example of free indirect speech. This style would be widely imitated by later authors, called in French discours indirect libre. It is also known as "estilo indirecto libre" in Spanish, and is often used by Latin American writer Horacio Quiroga.
In German literature, the style, known as erlebte Rede, is perhaps most famous in the works of Franz Kafka, blurring the subject's first-person experiences with a grammatically third-person narrative perspective.
English and Irish literature
In English literature, Jane Austen helped to refine free indirect speech; though the technique appears heavily in her later novels, examples are also evident in her first novel, Northanger Abbey, which may be an indication that while it remained unpublished, Austen continued to revise its contents as her writing style evolved.[1] The opinions of her narrators are frequently blurred with the thoughts of her characters. The Irish author James Joyce is also renowned for invoking the method in works such as "The Dead" (see Dubliners) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Much of Virginia Woolf's novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway rely on free indirect discourse to take us into the minds of her characters.
Some argue that free indirect discourse was also used by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales.[2] When the narrator says in "The General Prologue" that he agrees with the Monk's opinion dismissing criticism of his very unmonastic way of life, he is apparently paraphrasing the monk himself:
These rhetorical questions may be regarded as the monk's own casual way of waving off criticism of his aristocratic lifestyle. Similar examples can be found in the narrator's portrait of the friar.
Further reading
Ann Banfield's critical work Unspeakable Sentences presents a typology of literary discourse.
Notes
- ^ Narelle Shaw "Free Indirect Speech and Jane Austen's 1816 Revision of Northanger Abbey" in the Norton Critical Edition of Northanger Abbey W.W. Norton & Company Inc. 2004
- ^ E.g. Helen Phillips, An introduction to the Canterbury tales, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000
External links
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