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Free Indirect Discourse

Entertainment / Literature / Free Indirect Discourse: A style of third-person narration that mingles within it traits from first-person narration, often shifting pronouns, adverbs, tense, and grammatical mode. The term comes from the French 'style indirect libre,' and Flaubert's use of this technique in French literature strongly influenced English-speaking authors like James Joyce. M. H. Abrams provides a hypothetical example for illustrative purposes in A Glossary of Literary Terms: Thus, a direct, 'He thought, 'I will see her home now, and may then stop at my mother's,' might shift, in an indirect representation, to: He would see her home then, and might afterward stop at his mother's (Abrams 169). Though most scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature emphasize Flaubert's contribution, the technique does predate him. Chaucer himself uses it in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, where the narrator Geoffrey describes the Monk's attitude to monastic rules [I (A) 183-88], and moves from direct quotation of dialogue into a paraphrased list of the Monk's main arguments presented as if the narrator were the one speaking.
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