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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free indirect speech | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:41:21.977793+00:00 | kb-cron |
Roy Pascal cites Goethe and Jane Austen as the first novelists to use this style consistently, and writes that Gustave Flaubert was the first to be 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. Arthur Schnitzler's novella Leutnant Gustl first published in Neue Freie Presse newspaper in 1900 is considered the earliest book length example. In Danish literature, the style is attested since Leonora Christina (1621–1698) (and is, outside literature, even today common in colloquial Danish speech). Some of the first sustained examples of free indirect discourse in Western literature occur in Latin literature, where the phenomenon often takes the name of oratio obliqua. It is characteristic, for instance, of the style of Julius Caesar, but it is also found in the historical work of Livy.
=== English, Irish and Scottish literature === As stated above, Austen was one of its first practitioners. According to Austen scholar Tom Keymer, "It has been calculated that Pride and Prejudice filters its narrative, at different points, through no fewer than nineteen centres of consciousness, more than any other Austen novel (with Mansfield Park, at thirteen, the nearest competitor)." The American novelist Edith Wharton relies heavily on the technique in her 1905 novel The House of Mirth. And Zora Neale Hurston—the American author and anthropologist—conceived much of the development of her fictional characters around indirect speech and style. According to literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., Hurston, in her acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, (1937), plotted the journey of her protagonist Janie Crawford "from object to subject" by shifting back and forth between her own (Hurston's) "literate narrator's voice and a highly idiomatic black voice found in wonderful passages of free indirect discourse". It also appears in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), where the words of various characters are filtered through the point of view of the young narrator, Scout Finch. Irish author James Joyce also used free indirect speech in works such as "The Dead" (in 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". Lawrence most often uses free indirect speech, a literary technique that describes the interior thoughts of the characters using third-person singular pronouns ('he' and 'she') in both The Rainbow and Women in Love. 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." Some argue that free indirect discourse was also used by Chaucer 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 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.
== See also == Stream of consciousness (narrative mode) Metalepsis – Figure of speech
== References ==
== Further reading == Cohn, Dorrit, Transparent Minds Gingerich, Jon. "The Benefits of Free Indirect Discourse". LitReactor. Retrieved 3 April 2013. Haberland, Hartmut, Indirect speech in Danish. In: F. Coulmas ed. Direct and indirect speech. 219-254. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986 Mey, Jacob L., When Voices Clash. A Study in Literary Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Prince, Gerald, Dictionary of Narratology Stevenson, Randall, Modernist Fiction. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1992. Wood, James, How Fiction Works. New York: Picador, 2009. Ron, Moshe, "Free Indirect Discourse, Mimetic Language Games and the Subject of Fiction", Poetics Today, Vol. 2, No. 2, Narratology III: Narration and Perspective in Fiction (Winter, 1981), pp. 17-39
== External links == The Literary Encyclopedia: Free Indirect Discourse What is Free Indirect Discourse?: Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms