Free indirect speech

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.) Randall Stevenson suggests, however, that the term free
indirect discourse "is perhaps best reserved for instances where words have actually
been spoken aloud" and that cases "where a character's voice is probably the silent
inward one of thought" should be described as free indirect style. [1]

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
clausecarrying 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 devices
such as interjections and psycho-ostensive expressions like curses and swearwords
can be used that cannot be normally used within a subordinate clause. Deictic
pronouns and adverbials refer to the coordinates of the originator of the speech or
thought, not of the narrator.
Free indirect discourse can also be described, as a "technique of presenting a
character's voice partly mediated by the voice of the author", or, in the words of the
French narrative theorist Gerard Genette, "the narrator takes on the speech of the
character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator,
and the two instances then are merged."[2]

Examples of direct, indirect, and free indirect speech

Quoted or direct 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.

Reported or normal indirect 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
Roy Pascal cites Goethe and Jane Austen as the first novelists to use this style
consistently.[3] He says the nineteenth century French novelist Flaubert was the first
to be consciously aware of it as a style. 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 (experienced speech), is

perhaps most famous in the works of Franz Kafka, blurring the subject's first-person
experiences with a grammatically third-person narrative perspective.
In Danish literature, the style is attested since Leonora Christina (1621-1698) (and is,
outside literature, even today common in colloquial Danish speech).

English, Irish and Scottish literature

As stated above, Austen was one of its first practitioners. The Irish author James
Joyce also used free indirect speech in works such as "The Dead" (see Dubliners), A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. Scottish author James
Kelman uses the style extensively, most notably in his Booker Prize winning
novel How Late It Was, How Late, but also in many of his short stories and some of
his novels, most of which are written in Glaswegian speech patterns. Virginia Woolf in
her novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway frequently relies on free indirect
discourse to take us into the minds of her characters. Another modernist, D. H.
Lawrence, also makes frequent use of a free indirect style in "transcribing unspoken
or even incompletely verbalized thoughts", in both The Rainbow and Women in Love.
[4]
According to Charles Rzepka of Boston University, Elmore Leonard's mastery of
free indirect discourse "is unsurpassed in our time, and among the surest of all time,
even if we include Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Hemingway in the mix."[5]
Some argue that free indirect discourse was also used by Chaucer in The
Canterbury Tales.[6] 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 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.