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-personGrammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
direct speech. (It is also referred to as
free indirect discourse,
free indirect style, or
discours indirect libre in
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
.)
What distinguishes free indirect speech from normal indirect speech is the lack of an introductory expression such as "He said" or "he thought".
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-personGrammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
direct speech. (It is also referred to as
free indirect discourse,
free indirect style, or
discours indirect libre in
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
.)
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 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.
- Indirect (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
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
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 literatureGerman literature comprises those literary texts written in the German language.This includes literature written in Germany itself as well as German-language Swiss and Austrian literature, and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora....
, the style, known as
erlebte Rede, is perhaps most famous in the works of
Franz KafkaFranz Kafka was a major fiction writer of the 20th century. He was born to a middle-class German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Bohemia , Austria–Hungary...
, blurring the subject's first-person experiences with a grammatically third-person narrative perspective.
English and Irish literature
In
English literatureEnglish literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was born in Poland, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, V.S....
,
Jane AustenJane Austen was an English novelist, whose realism, biting social commentary and use of free indirect speech, have earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writers in English literature....
helped to refine free indirect speech; though the technique appears heavily in her later novels, examples are also evident in her first novel,
Northanger AbbeyNorthanger Abbey was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed for publication, though she had previously made a start on Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice...
, which may be an indication that while it remained unpublished, Austen continued to revise its contents as her writing style evolved. The opinions of her narrators are frequently blurred with the thoughts of her characters. The Irish author
James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish expatriate author, playwright and poet of the 20th century. He is known for his landmark novel Ulysses and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake , as well as the short story collection Dubliners and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of...
is also renowned for invoking the method in works such as "The Dead" (see
DublinersDubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. The fifteen stories were meant to be a naturalistic depiction of the Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century....
) and
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialized in The Egoist from 1914 to 1915 and published in book form in 1916...
. Much of Virginia Woolf's novel
To the Lighthouse relies 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 The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century . The tales are contained inside a frame tale and told by a collection of pilgrims on a pilgrimage from Southwark to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral...
. When the narrator says in "The
General PrologueThe General Prologue is the assumed title of the series of portraits that precedes The Canterbury Tales. It was the work of 14th century English writer and courtier Geoffrey Chaucer.-Synopsis:...
" 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
thumb|250px|right|Cloister of Saint Trophimus, in [[Arles]], [[France]]thumb|250px|right|Cloister of [[Abbaye de Fontenay]], in [[Marmagne]], [[France]]...
alwey to poure?
- Or swinken with his handes, and laboure,
- As Austin
Augustine of Hippo , Bishop of Hippo Regius, also known as St. Augustine or St. Austin, was an Algerian Berber philosopher and theologian....
bit? How shal the world be served?
- Lat Austin have his swink to him reserved!"
These
rhetorical questionA rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply Rhetorical questions encourage the listener to think about what the answer to the question must be. When a speaker states, "How much longer must our people...
s 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 BanfieldAnn Banfield, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction and The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism . She has taught at Berkeley since 1975...
's critical work
Unspeakable SentencesUnspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction is a study of sentences in free indirect speech and its limitations, published in 1982 by American linguist Ann Banfield....
presents a typology of literary discourse.
External links