Reading Novels

7. Free Indirect Discourse

111 7 Free Indirect Discourse In Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist Alice is sitting at the kitchen table thinking about housework. We are given something like interior monologue , but which is narrated to us using the third-person she: All these things that must be done. Alice knew that she would do none of them, until she heard from Mary. She would sit here, by herself, doing nothing. Funny, she was described as unemployed, she had never had a job, and she was always busy. To sit quietly, just thinking, a treat, that. To be by oneself—nice. Guilt threatened to invade with this thought: it was disloyalty to her friends. She didn’t want to be like her mother who was selfish. She used to nag and bitch to have an afternoon to herself: the children had to lump it. Privacy. That lot made such a thing about privacy; 99 per cent of the world’s population wouldn’t know the word. If they had ever heard it. No, it was better like this, healthy, a group of comrades. Sharing. (Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist, 1985, p. 103) Alice’s thoughts are represented here (“just thinking”), but in a style that can also be used for speech, called free indirect discourse.1 The direct form for thoughts would give us: “She thought, ‘I will sit here, by myself, doing nothing.’” The indirect form would give us: “She thought that she would sit there by herself doing nothing.” Here we find a form that does not represent the narrator’s words, and yet is not in quotation marks. Some of the passage seems to be in the words (or di- reading novels 112 rectly from the standpoint) of the character, but using she and not I. This is called free indirect style. A typical example at the sentence level is: “She would sit here, by herself, doing nothing.” What we have, then, is a useful way of representing speech or thought. It is not quite clear how much is supposed to come directly from the character and how much is the report of the narrator, but the vagueness in this respect is functional, because it allows us suggestions of proximity to the mental processes of the character. Thought or speech can be represented in this way without being regimented into well-formed sentences. The style is used to communicate the way we think certain things but don’t fully articulate them to ourselves, or the way in which our speeches are something of a rag-bag of odds and ends of phrases, and yet characteristic of the speaker and able to communicate sense to someone who knows the context. Characteristics of Free Indirect Discourse Linguists have attempted to produce a definition, or formal description, of free indirect discourse, and associate the following with it: 1. Pronouns referring to the speaker or thinker are in the third person, as in indirect speech (in the passage quoted above: “she was described ,” “she had never had a job”). 2. Frequent use of exclamatory words and phrases, as well as rhetorical questions. Such words alert readers to the sense that a different kind of discourse is being used. Yes and oh are common (in the quoted passage, “nice,” “no”). 3. Frequent use of modal auxiliary verbs—particularly the “shifted” modals, could, would, and might (“she would do,” “she would sit”). 4. Time and place deictics referring to the here and now of the character (“she would sit here,” “like this”). They are not transferred to the past and to a distanced place (there, that, then) as they would be in reports of indirect speech.2 5. Fragmentary sentences (“Privacy.” “Sharing.”). 6. Tag phrases used at the end of sentences, such as “XXXX, he thought.” Or they are in parenthesis, after we have adjusted to reading the rest of the sentence as free indirect discourse. free indirect discourse 113 It is not impossible to use free indirect discourse in nonfiction reporting, but it is more characteristic of fiction—and is frequently taken as a marker of fictionality. Use of this style for representing speech and thought develops through nineteenth-century fiction (possibly it is found earlier, though it is not common). It comes to play a key role in late nineteenth-century realism (in the work of George Moore and George Gissing, for example) and is then also central for the twentieth...