Narrative DeliveryAdvanced
Free Indirect Discourse
Third-person prose that adopts a character's voice and judgement without quoting it.
Principle
Free indirect lets the narrator and character share a sentence.
Takeaways
- It collapses the wall between report and interiority.
- It permits irony — the narrator can let the character condemn themselves.
- Misused, it produces ambiguity about who is speaking.
Overview
Free indirect discourse renders a character's thought, idiom, and bias inside the third-person sentence, without attribution or quotation marks. It is the engine of much realist and modernist prose, from Austen onward.
Examples
- Of course she would go to the dance. Why wouldn't she. The dress would simply have to do.
- The fool. Hadn't he been told three times.
- The town was beautiful, if you didn't look at it for too long.