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.

Flaubert is often cited as an example of free indirect speech (one that would be widely imitated by later authors), called in French style indirect libre. 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. 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.

[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.