Free indirect speech
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Free indirect speech (or free indirect discourse or free indirect style) is a style of third person narration which combines some of the characteristics of third-person report with first-person direct speech. Passages written using free indirect speech are often ambiguous as to whether they convey the views of the narrator or of the character the narrator is describing, allowing a flexible and sometimes ironic interaction of internal and external perspectives.[1]
In English literature, Jane Austen was among the first authors to use free indirect speech in a significant and deliberate manner. The opinions of her narrators are frequently blurred with the thoughts of her characters. The following passage, taken from her novel Emma (1816), exemplifies the device as used by Austen:
He professed himself extremely anxious about her fair friend - her fair, lovely, amiable friend. `Did she know? - had she heard any thing about her, since their being at Randalls? - he felt much anxiety - he must confess that the nature of her complaint alarmed him considerably.'[2]
Flaubert's use of the French imperfect tense is cited as an example of free indirect speech, called in French style indirect libre.
[edit] Further reading
Ann Banfield's critical work Unspeakable Sentences presents a typology of literary discourse.
Free indirect discourse is a literary device that Chaucer already made use of in The Canterbury Tales. 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: "And I seyde his opinion was good:/ What sholde he studie, and make himselven wood,/ Upon a book in cloistre alwey to poure,/Or swinken with his handes, and laboure,/ As Austin bit? How shal the world be served?/ Lat Austin have his swink to him reserved!" These rhetorical questions seem to be 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.
[edit] External links
[edit] Notes
- ^ see The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, Sixth Edition (2000)
- ^ Jane Austen, Emma, Chapter XV, Penguin Books Ltd, Rev Ed edition (31 Jan 2003), ed. Dr. Fiona Stafford
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