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research-article2014
LAL0010.1177/0963947014530771Language and LiteratureRundquist

Article

Language and Literature

2014, Vol. 23(2) 159­–174
How is Mrs Ramsay thinking? © The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0963947014530771
consciousness presentation lal.sagepub.com

categories within free indirect

style

Eric Rundquist
University of Nottingham, UK

Abstract
The stylistic categories available for presenting consciousness have important semantic
implications for the interpretation of fictional minds in narratives. Free indirect style, the
broadest and most stylistically problematic of those categories, is particularly important because
of the exceptional degree to which it grants readers access to characters’ mental experience.
However, recent work in cognitive narratology (e.g. Herman, 2011a, 2011b; Palmer, 2004,
2011; Zunshine, 2006) has de-prioritized the category approach to consciousness presentation,
and with it free indirect style, by adopting a cognitive science-based methodology that is less
grounded in linguistic analysis. In this article I argue that a departure from consciousness
presentation categories is not advantageous to the progression of narratological scholarship,
and that a continued focus on the linguistic constructs that individuate the categories should
be integrated with developments in the cognitive approach. This is because different categories
and sub-categories have different semantic effects in terms of the extent to which they express
verbal or non-verbal mental activity, as well as the aspects of consciousness that they evoke.
The broad category of free indirect style in particular has a distinct semantic effect in relation
to other techniques: it brings about what is best described as a representational relationship
between the narrative discourse and the fictional consciousness. In order to substantiate these
claims, I analyse a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), in which frequent
shifts between and manipulations of consciousness presentation categories provide a context
for elucidating their semantic implications.

Corresponding author:
Eric Rundquist, School of English, Trent Building, The University of Nottingham, University Park,
Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK.
Email: aexejru@nottingham.ac.uk
160 Language and Literature 23(2)

Keywords
Cognitive narratology, consciousness presentation categories, exceptionality, fictional minds,
free indirect style, inner speech, modernism, thought presentation, To the Lighthouse, Woolf

1 Introduction
Free indirect style is a term often used for the ‘discourse’ presentation category that com-
bines features of indirect discourse (past tense and third person reference) with features of
direct discourse (e.g. a character’s deictic adverbs, expressive constructs and subjective
lexis). The style expresses a character’s subjectivity without quoting him or her directly
and without subordinating it syntactically to a reporting clause. As the most problematic
and intriguing category within the ‘discourse’ category approach to speech and thought
presentation, it has been the topic of a great deal of research going back over a hundred
years. However, many scholars have pointed out that free indirect style does not only apply
to verbal discourse: it can be extended to the presentation of consciousness in general, not
just the type of thought that is fully articulated in the mind. Analysed as a consciousness
presentation category, the style can be identified in the representation of a range of mental
activities at different levels of consciousness, including reflective thought, perceptions and
states of mind. In order to accommodate these diverse phenomena, free indirect style can
be considered a broad category that contains at least three sub-categories: (1) Free indirect
thought, or FIT (Leech and Short, 2007 [1981]), normally contains the expressive con-
structs and discourse patterns of spoken language, as in the direct question, ‘Where the
devil were they, she thought?’ (2) In represented perception (Brinton, 1980) the depiction
of the narrative world is semantically oriented to a character’s point of view, as in the deic-
tic expression, ‘He was coming near’. (3) Consonant psycho-narration (Cohn, 1978) con-
veys a character’s states of mind and other mental operations without implying an external
vantage point, as in, ‘Now she was feeling elated’. While all of these categories can be
identified pragmatically as well as linguistically, they are schematic generalizations based
on fundamental stylistic distinctions; and they are semantic to the extent that they convey
different aspects of a character’s consciousness to the reader.
In his highly influential work, Palmer (2002, 2004) proposes that narratology ‘step
outside [the] limitations’ of what he calls the ‘speech category approach’ to fictional
consciousness (2004: 75). He claims that this long-standing stylistic approach ‘does not
give an adequate account of … characters’ minds … because it is based on the assump-
tion that the categories applied to fictional speech can be unproblematically applied to
fictional thought’ (2002: 30). Palmer’s reasoning is that verbalized mental discourse
comprises only a small portion of human thought in real minds, and therefore the catego-
ries not only give undue priority to ‘inner speech’ in fictional minds, they also miscon-
strue a character’s thought entirely as such (2002: 32–33). Elsewhere (2011: 207), Palmer
has claimed that the ‘undue emphasis on private, solitary, and highly verbalized thought
at the expense of all the other types of mental functioning has resulted in a preoccupation
with such concepts as free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, and interior mon-
ologue’. Ultimately, the implication of Palmer’s argument as I understand it is that if
scholarship would put aside the ‘speech’ category approach to consciousness
Rundquist 161

presentation in favour of a cognitive science-based methodology, it might be able to

arrive at a better understanding of how fictional minds are constructed. To this end he
reiterates ‘functionalist’ cognitive theories that conceive the mind as a ‘machine’ or an
‘information processing device’ (2004: 90), and he analyses the interpretation of fictional
minds according to how these frameworks describe the way people attribute minds to
each other in real-life human interaction.
While Palmer’s application of cognitive theories has been a crucial development in
narratological scholarship, his proposed departure from the category approach to con-
sciousness presentation can be understood as an implicit departure from the general ten-
ets of literary linguistic criticism. I will argue that consciousness presentation categories
are based on essential variations in syntactic structure and lexical choices that cannot be
overlooked in stylistic analysis. They comprise the entire range of linguistic possibilities
available for presenting fictional consciousness, and the fact that some of them coincide
with the structures used in speech presentation should be accommodated and explained,
not ignored. From a functionalist standpoint (linguistic functionalism, not cognitive), the
linguistic constructs that determine the categories are not meaningless: they are semanti-
cally relevant for how texts are read and interpreted and how fictional consciousnesses
and narrative worlds are construed.
The paradigm shift to cognitive science methodology that Palmer and others have
embarked upon has focused on analysing readers’ interactions with fictional minds as if they
were real minds while de-prioritizing the mechanics and effects of linguistic variations in
their textual construction. As Herman puts it, ‘readers’ knowledge of fictional minds is
mediated by the same kinds of reasoning protocols … that mediate encounters with every-
day minds’ (2011a: 11). And while there is undoubtedly a great deal of truth in this claim,
some advocates of the ‘cognitive turn’ in narratology seem to embrace it largely at the
expense of the ‘linguistic turn’ that came before. Other scholars, such as cognitive poeticians
Gavins and Stockwell (2012), argue that the cognitive turn should not lose sight of the tex-
tual foundations of literary discourse. If narratology is to heed their advice, it means that
essential linguistic constructs employed in consciousness presentation must remain relevant
for analysis: we should not ‘step outside the limitations’ of the categories that schematize
these constructs, but should seek to integrate them with the cognitive paradigm.
I begin by taking up one of the key issues that concerns Palmer, the problem of inner
speech in fictional consciousness presentation. Contrary to his assertion (2011: 207) that
free indirect style is part of traditional narratology’s ‘preoccupation’ that emphasizes
inner speech, this style is actually one of the means by which narrative discourse can
convey different degrees of verbalization, as well as reflexivity, within a character’s
mental activity. Traditional stylistic scholarship has had a lot to say on this issue, and
disagreements abound about the style’s semantic implications in this regard. But before
turning to that scholarship, it will be helpful to look at a passage from To the Lighthouse
that contextualizes the issue.

2 Free direct thought/free indirect thought

The following passage fluctuates between various consciousness presentation catego-
ries, contrasting them and providing a context for investigating their semantic
162 Language and Literature 23(2)

implications on a reader’s intuitive understanding of how the character is thinking. Our

first priority will be the explicit contrasts between free direct thought (FDT) and free
indirect thought (FIT). I consider FIT to be a sub-category within the broader free indi-
rect style, one which pertains specifically to the representation of highly conscious,
reflective thought in a character’s mental activity. However, the extent to which thought
represented with FIT can also be understood as ‘inner speech’ is highly problematic. The
context of this passage is that Mrs Ramsay is cleaning up after her young boy, and as she
does so she becomes lost in thought.

[1] No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out—a refrigerator, a
mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress—children never forget. [2] For this reason it
was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed.
[3] For now she need not think about anybody. [4] She could be herself, by herself. [5] And that
was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well not even to think. [6] To be silent; to be
alone. [7] All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk,
with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something
invisible to others. [8] Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt
herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. [9]
When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. [10] And to
everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another,
she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are
simply childish. [11] Beneath it all is dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now
and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. [12] Her horizon seemed to her
limitless. [13] There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself
pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. [14] This core of darkness could go
anywhere, for no one saw it. [15] They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. [16] There was
freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on
a platform of stability. [17] Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she
accomplished here something dexterous with her needles), but as a wedge of darkness (Woolf,
1994 [1927]: 45).

The FDT within this passage (the root sentence in 1, the first half of 10 and all of 11)
explicitly presents Mrs Ramsay’s thought as inner speech. FDT is a highly mimetic
category – it could only be more so, perhaps, if it used quotation marks – and it gives the
distinct impression that Mrs Ramsay is mentally articulating the words on the page.
Sentence 1 contains an attributive parenthetical (‘she thought …’) and a root-sentence
(root-S) (‘No, children never forget’). While the root-S does not contain the first person
pronoun, the gnomic present tense allows it to be read as FDT, and this is supplemented
by the conversational discourse marker (‘no’) and the explicit attribution to the character.
The discourse in sentences 10 and 11, starting with the subordinate finite clause (‘our
apparitions … are simply childish’), again contains the present tense, but it also exhibits
the first person plural and second person pronouns.
These grammatical features of FDT have essentially the same effect as quotation,
attributing the words on the page to the locutionary agency of the character, and thereby
construing her thought as inner speech. This consciousness presentation category is
therefore a semantic device that directly affects one’s understanding of how a character
is thinking. Semino and Short (2004) claim, based on an analysis of a literary corpus, that
Rundquist 163

‘(F)DT tends to be reserved for cases where it is conceivable that characters could have
mentally articulated their thoughts in verbal form’ (2004: 118). Palmer may be correct in
his assertion that inner speech makes up only a small part of human cognition, but it is
undeniable that people do often think with words, and (free) direct thought is the primary
means of presenting this type of thought in narrative.
If FDT has the effect of conveying Mrs Ramsay’s thought as inner speech, we must
also consider the implications of the free indirect thought (FIT) that is contrasted with it
in sentences 2–7 and the first part of 10. The alterations in consciousness presentation
categories are not merely aesthetic manoeuvres: they have an important semantic effect
for the reader’s understanding of how the character is thinking. Even though these FIT
sentences also express her subjectivity and convey her thoughts, they contain the past
tense and third person pronouns of narration which the character would not plausibly
articulate, even in her head. The transition to and from FIT in these sentences begs sev-
eral questions about how we understand the character’s mental activity in the fictional
world and its relationship to the textual language. In particular, it leads to the possibility
that thought presented with FIT in this type of situation can be interpreted as occurring
non-verbally.
There is no consensus in narratological scholarship about whether the type of thought
represented with FIT is a purely linguistic or (potentially) non-linguistic phenomenon. I
reserve the term FIT for manifestations of free indirect style in which the expressivity
and content of the discourse represent a character’s highly conscious, reflective thought,
not lower level and less reflective mental activities. Sotirova (2013) calls this the ‘classic
form of free indirect style’. According to her, free indirect style provides access to vari-
ous levels of a character’s consciousness, but ‘in its classic form it depicts only fully
verbalised thought’ (2013: 40). She explains that this is the dominant manifestation of
the style throughout the 19th century, before the experimental techniques of Modernist
writers broadened its applicability. Thus, for her, the FIT in sentences 2–7 and 10 would,
like FDT, convey Mrs Ramsay’s inner speech. Other scholars who claim that FIT is
strictly confined to the presentation of verbal thought include Genette (1980 [1972]),
Leech and Short (2007 [1981]), Vandelanotte (2009) and Toolan (2001).
On the other hand, there are also many scholars who claim that FIT can, at least poten-
tially, represent non-verbal thought. These include Cohn (1978), Banfield (1981, 1982),
Brinton (1995), Semino and Short (2004) and Blakemore (2009). Other stylisticians also
warn against analysing it as a form of quotation (Adamson, 1994a), or as derivative of
some underlying direct discourse (Aczel, 1998). According to Banfield, FIT ‘may repre-
sent thought with all its expressivity and subjective nuances without it being necessary
to assume that these thoughts ever took linguistic shape for the thinker’ (1982: 138).
Elsewhere she claims that FIT ‘does not present consciousness as inner speech. Rather,
it is language that represents what the character would have felt and thought reflectively’
(1981: 75). In fact, she goes on to state that FIT ‘must represent what is not linguistic’,
implying that thoughts conveyed with this category are never verbal in form (1981: 75).
Cohn, rather than taking an ‘always’ or ‘never’ position regarding the inner speech
question for FIT, considers this aspect of the construct’s semantics to be slightly ambigu-
ous, as well as co-text dependent. She proposes a litmus test for identifying FIT, whereby
when the discourse is ‘translated’ into the first person and present tense of direct thought
164 Language and Literature 23(2)

it could have plausibly occurred as inner speech (Cohn, 1978: 100). For example, sen-
tences 3–4, passing the litmus test, would read: ‘For now I need not think about anybody.
I can be myself by myself.’ In the same manner, all of the sentences from 2–7 can be
translated plausibly to direct thought. However, Cohn also warns that ‘it is essential that
the text is not the translation’ (1978: 103). In her chapter dedicated to FIT, she explains:

… the words on the page are not to be identified as words running through [the character’s]
mind. By leaving the relationship between words and thoughts latent, [FIT] casts a peculiarly
penumbral light on the figural consciousness, suspending it on the threshold of verbalization in
a manner that cannot be achieved by direct quotation. This ambiguity is unquestionably one
reason why so many writers prefer the less direct technique. (Cohn, 1978: 103, italics mine)

Thus, according to Cohn’s understanding, FIT can at least potentially convey non-
linguistic thought; and this contradicts Palmer’s assertion that scholarly preoccupation
with this style reflects a conception of thought entirely as inner speech. Cohn’s explana-
tion is often cited in the academic literature on thought presentation categories (e.g.
Brinton, 1980; Semino and Short, 2004), and it seems to me an accurate understanding
of this aspect of the style’s semantics.
Cohn also explains how the semantics of FIT can change in this regard depending on
which consciousness presentation category it borders. Bordering with ‘psycho-narration’
(IT, NRTA and NI in Leech and Short, 2007 [1981]), FIT ‘creates the impression of ren-
dering thoughts explicitly formulated in the figural mind’; bordering with (F)DT it ‘cre-
ates the impression that the narrator is formulating his character’s inarticulate feelings’
(Cohn, 1978: 106). If this idea is applied to the transition from FDT in sentence 1 to FIT
in 2, we might say that two different types of thought are expressed: fully articulate inte-
rior monologue transitions to a pre-verbal or semi-verbal stream of consciousness. In this
way, the change in thought presentation categories has the semantic effect of conveying
a change in how Mrs Ramsay is thinking.
However, the inherently ambiguous nature of FIT should not be overlooked. The only
thing that is ascertainable about the language of the style is that it does not reproduce a
character’s mental discourse verbatim: the tense and person deictics are such that a char-
acter would not conceivably articulate them him/herself. There is no way of discerning
unequivocally which elements in FIT might be quoted and which are not. Because of its
decidedly ambiguous relationship to the contents of a character’s thought, FIT at least
opens up the possibility that a character’s stream of consciousness is not a purely linguis-
tic phenomenon. The verbality of a character’s thought is not entirely determined by
style, though style can, in a passage like the one given earlier, be highly influential on a
reader’s impressions. Ultimately, our analysis in regard to the verbalized status of FIT
also depends to some extent on our understanding of the phenomenology of thought in
real life.
Short (2007), in a reappraisal of his (1981) discourse presentation categories, acknowl-
edges that there is an issue ‘concerning the extent [to which], outside fiction, our thoughts
come to us in linguistic form at all’ (228). The idea that thought is fundamentally non-
linguistic has been advocated by a number of cognitive scientists (Damasio, 1994; Fodor,
1975; Piaget, 1954; Pinker, 1994; Vygotsky, 1962). Short also surmises that one of the
Rundquist 165

problems of analysing thought presentation in fiction is that it is difficult to delineate

thought from other mental phenomena, like perceptions and states of mind. Some cogni-
tivists, like Langacker (2008), understand both thought and language as exponents of
‘embodied cognition’, where basic mental operations provide a ‘skeletal organization’
which through ‘combination and metaphorical projection’ leads to abstract thought, and
then to the possibility of language (2008: 32). If this is an accurate understanding of
higher-level mental operations, it is appropriate that Short finds it difficult to delineate
‘thought’ from other mental activities, since they are not only fundamentally non-verbal,
but they are grounded in the same conceptual structures.
It is therefore also fitting that narrative fiction is able to represent both basic and
higher level aspects of a character’s consciousness using a general stylistic technique,
free indirect style. In the following section I will explore how the linguistic construc-
tions that characterize FIT in the representation of highly conscious, reflective thought,
can also be used to represent more basic aspects of consciousness: perception and men-
tal states.

3 Free indirect thought/represented perception

Just as alterations between FDT and FIT can convey different degrees of verbality in a
character’s thought, other consciousness presentation categories represent aspects of
consciousness at lower levels of awareness and reflexivity. The latter have been analysed
as a general category by Cohn as ‘psycho-narration’ and by Banfield as ‘non-reflective
consciousness’. Other scholars have explored a narrower category known variously as
‘represented perception’ (Brinton, 1980), ‘narrated perception’ (Fludernik, 1993;
Pallarés-García, 2012), and ‘free indirect perception’ (Palmer, 2004; Schmid, 2010). In
the following sections I will analyse the foregoing passage from To the Lighthouse in
order to demonstrate the semantic effects of fluctuations between FIT and two other
distinct sub-categories, which I will refer to as represented perception and (consonant)
psycho-narration. I will also explain how, along with FIT, these stylistic techniques can
be analysed within the broader category of free indirect style.
Sentences 1–2, 8, 13 and 17 in the Lighthouse passage exhibit contrasts between FIT
and represented perception, once again demonstrating how fluctuations in consciousness
presentation categories convey different mental activities. To investigate the semantics
of these contrasting categories, we can begin with sentence 13 (‘There were all the places
she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain
of a church in Rome’). The sentence begins by representing Mrs Ramsay’s reflective
thought with overt FIT; but after the second semi-colon the mental verb ‘felt’ and the
physical description of the imagined scene cause a shift to represented perception, a
distinct – albeit related – consciousness presentation category. This distinction can be
clarified by translating the discourse to DT using Cohn’s litmus test: ‘There are all the
places I have not seen; the Indian plains’ is something that Mrs Ramsay could plausibly
have articulated as inner speech. But ‘I feel myself pushing aside the thick leather curtain
of a church in Rome’ reads as an incongruous description of an imagined physical sensa-
tion which the character would be much less likely to verbally articulate. This abrupt
transition from FIT to represented perception allows the narrative to capture a
166 Language and Literature 23(2)

less-reflective aspect of Mrs Ramsay’s mental activity – an almost hallucinatory sensa-

tion that accompanies her ongoing meditation.
Sentence 1, on the other hand, conveys a description of the ‘real’ world rather than
a scene Mrs Ramsay merely imagines, but here mimetic features within the discourse
indicate that it too is a representation of her perception. The subordinate clause
within the attributive parenthetical (‘putting together some of the things he cut
out—a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress—’), describes
her physical activity. It goes without saying that this discourse would fail Cohn’s
litmus test. However, there is a mimetic aspect to the style of this clause, in that even
while describing the physical world, it imitates, or represents, aspects of the charac-
ter’s consciousness; in other words it exhibits characteristics of free indirect style.
The noun phrases between dashes are an example of iconic ordering (Adamson,
1998): they imitate Mrs Ramsay’s perceptual experience of her actions. The mimetic
effect of this language is heightened by the expressive asyndetic structure and the
use of syntactic breaks to ‘interrupt the grammatical coherence’ (Sotirova, 2013: 46).
These features imply that the discourse does not simply present Mrs Ramsay’s
actions from an external, narratorial point of view – it conveys her own internal per-
spective on those actions. It represents her perception by depicting the fictional
world as she perceives it.
A similar, albeit more ambiguous, case of represented perception within a parentheti-
cal is in sentence 17 (‘she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles’).
This time the parenthetical occurs within a sentence of FIT. Once again the language of
the parenthetical obviously does not originate with Mrs Ramsay or convey her reflective
thought: it breaks with the content of her thought in the root-S by providing a description
of her actions. Nevertheless, the clause is ambiguous between a narratorial and figural
point of view on the action it describes. The deictic adverb ‘here’ can be understood as
either a discourse deictic from the narrator’s perspective or a temporal deictic from Mrs
Ramsay’s. Similarly, the NP ‘something dexterous’ can be read as either the narrator’s
objective description or the character’s subjective evaluation. If the parenthetical is read
as represented perception, then the discourse seems to aptly capture her lower-level con-
scious experience of physical activity during a moment of deep contemplation. Her self-
congratulatory regard for her knitting is analogous with the content of her ideation in the
FIT of the root-S. It is as if she ‘accomplishes something dexterous with her needles’ at
precisely the same moment that she arrives at a conclusive and general truth. The term
‘dexterous’, then, can be understood to evaluate the crescendo in her meditation as well
as her knitting, albeit at a less-conscious level.
Palmer (2004), in his departure from the ‘speech’ category approach, considers repre-
sented perception to be undervalued in the analysis of fictional minds. However, repre-
sented perception should itself be analysed as a consciousness presentation category
alongside FIT, DT and so forth. Categorizing the stylistic constructs that are available for
consciousness presentation allows us to compare the linguistic characteristics of those
constructs and to determine their semantic effects on fictional consciousness. The seman-
tic effect of represented perception is to convey narrative events as a character perceives
them, and to represent a character’s ‘immediate conscious experiences’ (Pallarés-García,
2012: 175). These effects can be contrasted on the one hand with the description of
Rundquist 167

events from an external, narratorial point of view, and on the other hand with the repre-
sentation of abstract higher level thought with FIT.
Despite the differences in the types of mental activity that FIT and represented per-
ception convey, these consciousness presentation categories share essential stylistic and
semantic similarities which allow them to be analysed as varieties of free indirect style.
Pallarés-García (2012) and Brinton (1980) have pointed out the linguistic similarities
between represented perception and FIT: these include modals, figural deictics, repeti-
tions, inversions, incomplete sentences, kinship terms, indefinite expressions and evalu-
ative language. Such features can be considered mimetic because they serve to imitate,
or represent, a character’s consciousness. However, the mimetic representation of con-
sciousness extends beyond ‘thought’ and ‘perception’ to other aspects of a character’s
mental activity.

4 Free indirect thought/consonant psycho-narration

The other type of narrative discourse conveying a character’s mental activity (i.e. con-
sciousness presentation category) that Palmer claims has been overlooked in stylistic
scholarship is what he calls ‘thought report’ (2002), and which I refer to, following Cohn,
as ‘psycho-narration’. Psycho-narration, which includes Leech and Short’s (2007 [1981])
categories of NRTA and internal narration, is traditionally understood as the narrator’s
discourse about a character’s mental activity. Palmer points out that psycho-narration is
essential for conveying several non-verbal aspects of fictional minds, such as emotions,
intentions, purposes, motives and mind states. However, his claim that this category has
been neglected in narratology in favour of ‘more mimetic techniques’ like FIT and DT
does not take into account the attention that both Cohn (1978) and Banfield (1981) have
dedicated to it. More general studies on free indirect style (e.g. Adamson, 1994b) have
also made forays into the realms of psycho-narration. Palmer’s placement of psycho-
narration outside the ‘speech’ category approach is also somewhat misleading: like (F)
DT, FIT and represented perception, psycho-narration is a consciousness presentation
category based on linguistic constructs which have a semantic effect on how the reader
understands the character’s mental activity. He is correct, however, in asserting that like
narrated perception this category is an important means by which narrative discourse
represents aspects of the character’s consciousness that are further removed from reflec-
tive thought and verbalization than FIT.
Like the narration of events, psycho-narration can be rendered from either the narra-
tor’s point of view or the character’s. In this respect, Cohn distinguishes between ‘dis-
sonant’ and ‘consonant’ psycho-narration. While in dissonant psycho-narration the
narratorial voice is clearly external to the consciousness it describes, in consonant psycho-
narration the narrator cannot be ‘grasped as a separate entity within the text’ (1978: 30).
This is a distinction that cognitive narratologists like Palmer and Herman ignore, as they
generally analyse all external descriptions of figural consciousness as if they provide
direct access to figural minds. Dissonant psycho-narration is not direct; it is mediated by
a narrating subject that has a distinct point of view from the mind it describes. Consonant
psycho-narration, however, not only denies an external, narratorial vantage point, but
like represented perception it can exhibit unsubordinated indications of figural
168 Language and Literature 23(2)

subjectivity. For this reason, consonant psycho-narration can also be analysed as a sub-
type of free indirect style.
In the quoted passage, sentences 1, 8, 12 and 15 all contain instances of psycho-
narration. While none of these instances exhibit overtly mimetic features, neither do they
contain features that suggest a narrating persona external to Mrs Ramsay’s conscious-
ness. They are therefore ambiguous in point of view. But the discourse is most easily
naturalized as consonant psycho-narration, a continuation of the free indirect style that
pervades the rest of the passage, because it is difficult to read it as abrupt shifts to a ‘dis-
sonant’ narratorial viewpoint. In sentence 8, however, there is an additional type of syn-
tactic construction that encourages interpreting the discourse in this way.
Sentence 8 contains an interesting juxtaposition of psycho-narration and FIT, and
provides further evidence for analysing both categories as part of the same general style
(‘Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this
self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures’). The sentence
begins with an apparently ‘narratorial’ description, breaking with the FIT that precedes it
by describing Mrs Ramsay’s physical situation. This clause is subordinated with a con-
trastive conjunction (‘although’) to a clause where the main verb is a mental verb (‘felt’).
This main clause (‘it was thus that she felt herself’) serves an attributive function, refer-
ring back to the FIT in the previous sentence with the anaphoric ‘thus’. Therefore, the
entire first half of 8 can be identified as a combination of psycho-narration and repre-
sented perception. After the semi-colon, however, the discourse style reverts to FIT, with
the expression of the character’s reflective ideation.
What makes this sentence particularly complex is not just the alteration in conscious-
ness presentation categories, but the fact that the discourse within the FIT clause co-
refers with the discourse in the psycho-narration (‘this self’ – ‘herself’). In a more
traditional analysis, this co-reference might create a paradoxical intertwining of narrative
levels: the character would have to be aware of the narratorial discourse in order to refer
back to it. However, if both FIT and consonant psycho-narration are consolidated within
free indirect style, this sentence does not pose an ontological problem. Both categories
serve to represent the character’s consciousness, albeit at different levels of awareness,
and neither necessarily transcribes the character’s verbalization. Since each expresses
the character’s point of view without necessitating her locutionary agency, the co-
reference between categories in a sentence like this one does not pose a problem for a
coherent and realistic interpretation of Mrs Ramsay’s consciousness.
Sentence 12 (‘Her horizon seemed to her limitless’) is also consonant psycho-
narration. The mental verb (‘seemed’) denotes the character’s own inference about the
abstract concept of her ‘horizon’. Without the dative (‘to her’) this sentence would con-
ceivably pass Cohn’s litmus test: ‘my horizon seems limitless’. However, taking the
dative into account, the reflexive self-reference in ‘seems to me’ makes a DT translation
incongruous. Thus, this linguistic feature creates distance from Mrs Ramsay’s ideation,
and the consonant psycho-narration that it reinforces has the semantic effect of represent-
ing an impression or a state of mind – a mental activity that is less reflective than thought
– without going so far as to evoke an external vantage point on her consciousness.
The other instances of psycho-narration in this passage (in sentences 1 and 15) occur
in the form of attributive parentheticals (‘she thought’). According to Banfield, such
Rundquist 169

parentheticals ‘may fall within the jurisdiction’ of free indirect style because they can be
read as representations of the character’s awareness of her mental activities (1981: 73).
Thus, while they are ambiguous in point of view, it is also possible to consider these
parentheticals consonant psycho-narration, continuations of free indirect style that per-
vades the entire passage.

5 Free indirect style: representation of consciousness

Though she does not use the same terminology, Sotirova sees the frequent occurrence of
represented perception and consonant psycho-narration as a consequence of the
‘Modernist revolution in style’. She explains that in the Modernist narratives of Woolf,
Lawrence and Joyce ‘free indirect style in its classical form’ – what I refer to as FIT – is
dissolved and blended with other typically narratorial techniques, like ‘dissonant’ psycho-
narration and the narration of events. This fusion of narrative styles makes it possible to
capture perceptual and preverbal states of a character’s mind while maintaining a ‘narra-
tive internal observation point’ (2013: 28). This is Sotirova’s stylistic explanation for the
claim made by David Lodge that these authors ‘manifest a general tendency to centre the
narrative in the consciousness of its characters, and to create those characters through the
representation of their subjective thoughts and feelings rather than by describing them
objectively’ (Lodge, 2002: 57). Sotirova explains that a crucial factor in Modernist nov-
els like To the Lighthouse is the dissemination of free indirect style throughout the narra-
tive discourse, which ‘allows for a character’s thoughts, emotions and perceptions to be
woven into the tissue of the narrative, giving the reader the impression that they have
direct access to the character’s consciousness’ (Sotirova, 2013: 29). The ultimate seman-
tic effect of the consistent deployment of the various types of free indirect style, for
Sotirova, is that it allows the entire story to be ‘refracted’ through characters’ conscious-
nesses (2013: 28). This is also the characteristic of Modernist novels that led Stanzel
(1984) to refer to them as reflector mode narratives.
There is, however, another semantic characteristic of the general category of free
indirect style that is often overlooked or taken for granted in stylistic narratology – and
which has been implicitly rejected in cognitive narratology – and that is the effect of
representing a character’s consciousness. ‘Representation’ is a ubiquitous term in schol-
arship on discourse and consciousness presentation, but it is used in a variety of senses
and it is rarely disambiguated. Several scholars use the term to refer to all types of speech
and thought presentation (e.g. Bakhtin, 1984, 1981; Genette, 1980 [1972]; Leech and
Short, 2007 [1981]; Schmid, 2010; Vandelanotte, 2009). Most, however, use the term to
refer specifically to free indirect style and discourse and consciousness presentation
(sub)categories within it (Adamson, 1994a; Blakemore, 2009; Brinton, 1980, 1995;
Dillon and Kirchhoff, 1976; Ehrlich, 1990; Fillmore and Kuroda (in Adamson 1995);
Pallarés-Garcia, 2012; Wright, 1995).
Banfield, perhaps the most avid proponent of the concept of representation in this
context, renames free indirect style ‘represented speech and thought’, or RST. She under-
stands this as a general category characterized by the unsubordinated expression of a
character’s point of view, incorporating both ‘reflective’ and ‘non-reflective conscious-
ness’. She claims that in both these varieties of the style, which encompass the
170 Language and Literature 23(2)

sub-categories I have detailed earlier, narrative discourse ‘must represent what is not
[necessarily] linguistic’, that is, a character’s consciousness (1981: 75). However, while
free indirect style is Banfield’s primary concern, her explanation of ‘representation’ is
exceedingly broad. For her it accommodates all evocations of fictional consciousness
and subjectivity, whether a narrator’s or a character’s, as well as all types of discourse
presentation. She distinguishes ‘representation’ only from ‘narration’, which she defines
as the objective report of narrative events (1982: 270–271).
Brinton and Wright, on the other hand, have a more specific understanding of repre-
sentation. For them, only free indirect style ‘permits the author to represent, in the char-
acter’s own expressive or emotive language, all levels of the character’s consciousness’.
This effect can be distinguished from that of indirect thought (IT), which can only report
a character’s thoughts, feelings and so on, ‘in the author’s language’; and DT, which
must present these ‘as fully conscious and articulated speech’ (Brinton, 1995: 87). It is
possible to be even more straightforward in discussing this aspect of the categories’
semantics, at least in the context of narrative fiction. Specifically, the representation of
consciousness in free indirect style can be contrasted with the alternative semantic effects
of quotation in (F)DT, and description in dissonant psycho-narration and IT. While the
categories can obviously be manipulated pragmatically to break with such generaliza-
tions, acknowledging these semantic norms should be helpful in elucidating the presen-
tation of consciousness in fiction.
Acknowledging the distinction of free indirect style, and of the various categories
within it, is essential to understanding how narrative discourse conveys fictional minds,
and to analysing how characters think and consciously experience their worlds. The rep-
resentational effect of the style, as we have seen, applies across different levels of con-
sciousness. Marnette (2005: 50) claims that fictional consciousness can be conceived on
a continuum, ranging from highly reflective thought and linguistic thought to non-
reflective mind states and sensations. The idea of embodied cognition in cognitive lin-
guistics also implies this sort of continuum: more abstract and complex mental activities
spring from more concrete and basic ones; and these increasing levels of abstraction have
led to the development of language. If this theory is correct then it seems appropriate that
the entire spectrum of mental phenomena – thought, states of mind, emotions, percep-
tions, sensations, and so on – can all be represented by narrative discourse via free indi-
rect style, without evoking an external, narratorial point of view. None of these mental
phenomena are inherently linguistic, but they are all part of the conceptual substrate that
gives language meaning. Thus, it is perfectly natural that narrative language can access
and linguistically articulate these phenomena in characters’ minds, even if the characters
do not do so themselves.

6 Transparent fictional minds

Taking a different approach to fictional consciousness, many cognitive narratologists
analyse characters’ minds in a manner that is mostly indifferent to free indirect style. One
of the main instigators for this indifference has been Palmer’s (2002, 2004) assertion that
stylistic narratology, through the ‘speech’ category approach, has focused too strongly on
inner speech and has neglected the narrator’s discourse about characters’ minds, which is
Rundquist 171

essential for accessing the non-verbal aspects of their mental activity. There are a number
of issues that I have with Palmer’s argument: (a) it encourages a restricted view of the
consciousness presentation categories as techniques that parallel those used in speech
presentation, without accommodating represented perception and psycho-narration
within the category approach; (b) it does not consider the potential of FIT to express non-
verbal thought; and (c) it undervalues the importance of distinguishing between narrative
discourse from a character’s point of view (i.e. free indirect style) and that which is
external to it. Another influential claim that Palmer has made is that ‘novel reading is
mind reading’ (2011: 8). While this claim is certainly accurate in many regards, it also
implies that all narrative discourse represents characters’ consciousness, regardless of
the subjective orientation of the language. This implication has led to some other prob-
lematic claims about fictional minds from cognitive narratology.
Both Zunshine (2006, 2011) and Palmer claim that readers access fictional minds
using the same cognitive abilities that allow them to access real minds, or to ‘mind read’,
in social interaction. Specifically, for Zunshine, a reader’s Theory of Mind allows them
to attribute minds and mental activities to characters based on external, behaviouristic
cues. Palmer argues that narrative analysis should pay more attention to how readers
infer characters’ mental activities based on narratorial descriptions of behaviours, as well
as descriptions of the fictional world, which should always be read as characters’ percep-
tions. Herman (2011a), in a similar vein, argues against the ‘exceptionality’ thesis for
narrative fiction, which posits ‘the unique ability of fictional narratives to represent the
‘I-originarity’ of the other [that is, the third person character] as subject’ (2011a: 7). In
other words, the idea that fictional minds are exceptionally ‘transparent’, as the title of
Cohn’s book suggests, is fallacious because ‘all minds can be more or less directly expe-
rienced’, and ‘the procedures used to engage with fictional minds piggyback on those
used to interpret real minds’ (2011a: 10–11). Herman (2011b) also claims that there is no
basis for distinguishing between contents of fictional minds and the external fictional
world, both because minds are interpretable based on external cues, and because the
mind is an ‘extended’ phenomenon, inextricably linked with its environment.
These claims certainly bear some validity. It is undoubtedly true that humans possess
‘mind reading’ capabilities by which we infer the mental activities of others based on
external cues; and readers bring these abilities to bear when enacting and interpreting
fictional minds. It is also true that minds are intimately linked to the worlds in which they
reside, and the lines that delineate the mind from the body, from other minds and from
the world are often blurred. However, it is also undoubtedly true that an individual’s
ideas and states of mind are not always accessible to others in real-life contexts, nor does
one’s mind inevitably coincide with the ‘reality’ one inhabits. In other words, while some
aspects of our minds are public, and intertwined with reality, others are private and
removed.
In the real world, the accessible domains of others’ minds are only available through
verbal communication and through inferences based on external, physical cues. In fic-
tion, however, the potentially accessible domains of characters’ minds by far exceed
those of real people in social interaction, and they also are accessible via different means.
For one, fiction can convey the silent private discourse (inner speech) that an individual
does not choose to communicate. But also, and much more importantly, narrative fiction
172 Language and Literature 23(2)

can access thoughts and other facets of consciousness that do not take linguistic form at
all, and it can represent these phenomena with language. As Cohn puts it, ‘the [linguistic]
representation of characters’ inner lives is the touchstone that sets narrative fiction apart
from reality’ (1978: 7). It is through free indirect style that this representational effect is
achieved, and it is with sub-categories within the style – FIT, represented perception and
psycho-narration – that different domains of consciousness are expressed. In the degree
to which narrative fiction can enter into characters’ minds and render them transparent
by representing consciousness linguistically, it is indeed exceptional.
In this article I have argued in favour of the continued relevance of consciousness
presentation categories for narrative analysis. The categories are based on crucial lin-
guistic distinctions, so that narratological criticism cannot move ‘outside their limita-
tions’ as Palmer advocates without also moving outside the realm of stylistics. Moreover,
like all stylistic variations, the categories are semantic constructs: they have an essential
effect on how readers understand characters’ minds. I have analysed a passage from
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse where contrasting categories highlight their semantic distinc-
tions in terms of the aspects of consciousness they convey. I have also addressed free
indirect style as a broad category that includes the subcategories of FIT, represented
perception and consonant psycho-narration, and which generally entails a representa-
tional relationship between narrative language and a character’s consciousness. This rep-
resentational function applies to mental phenomena along a continuum ranging from
high-level abstract thought to more basic ‘embodied’ mental activity. Free indirect style
enhances the ability of narrative to convey realistic fictional minds, and to do so in a
manner that exceeds the accessibility of real minds of other people in everyday social
experience.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biography
Eric Rundquist is a PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham and a part-time lecturer at
Middlesex University, London. His research interests include free indirect style, the linguistic
construction of fictional consciousness and subjectivity, Modernist fiction and cognitive grammar.
He has contributed a chapter in the edited volume The Continuum Handbook of Linguistics (in
press), which is titled ‘Representations of consciousness in Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce: Modernist
experimentations with the free indirect style’.