Free indirect discourse

Sometimes also "free indirect style", "style indirect libre" (French), "erlebte Rede" (German). In narrative theory, a term to denote a particular way of representing a character's speech or thoughts

• in the third person and (frequently) in the past tense, hence "indirect"
• but without a "verbum dicendi" (e.g. "he said", "she thought"), hence "free".

Free indirect style retains more of a character's distinctive way of talking and thinking than reported speech does. At the same time, and in contrast to the stream of consciousness technique (where the words on the page are a supposedly "unfiltered" quotation taken from a character's mind), free indirect style also implies a subtle difference between the character (whose perceptions we share) and the narrator (whose presence we can sense in the third-person pronouns, the past tense forms etc.). Therefore, free indirect style can have the paradoxical effect of making a reader more aware of a character's erroneous beliefs and other shortcomings.

Example

The following excerpt from Mrs Dalloway gives us Lucrezia Smith's thoughts about her husband Septimus: "Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible. And he would not kill himself; and she could tell no one. [...] Nothing could make her happy without him! Nothing! He was selfish. So men are. For he was not ill. Dr. Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him" (Woolf 27).

Here, free indirect style allows the reader to sense Lucrezia's authentic desperation. By contrast, reported speech/thought would sound rather formal - 'Lucrezia believed that nothing could make her happy without her husband' - and would also have to drop the linguistic markers of emotion, such as the repetitions and ellipses, i.e. incomplete sentences. Yet the effect of free indirect style here is not as totalising as the stream of consciousness technique either (something like, or even less coherent than, 'I cannot sit beside him when he stares so and does not see me and makes everything terrible sky and tree children playing dragging carts blowing whistles falling down all is terrible'). It is clear that the narrating voice is situated outside of Lucrezia's mind (though limiting itself to her thoughts and perceptions for the moment), and the novel proceeds to juxtapose Lucrezia's subjective perspective with the equally limited world-views of other characters, not least her traumatised husband.

Sources

• Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th Edition. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1999.
• Martinez, Matias, and Michael Scheffel. Einführung in die Erzähltheorie. 8th ed. München: C.H. Beck, 2009.
• Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin, 1996.