![]() ![]() Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘ Mary Postgate’ (1915), written during the First World War, focuses on a woman who works as a servant for a family in England. That’s free indirect speech.įree indirect style can sometimes be put to even greater use by a writer – indeed, it can change our entire interpretation of the story. Instead, the narrator is going to pass on Bertha’s thoughts to us – a little messy, repetitive, verging on being out of control – as they tumble into her head, unfiltered, unedited. She reflected that it was like suddenly swallowing a bright piece of late afternoon sun…’). ![]() But the narrator is not going to ‘tidy’ these up for us by saying, for instance, ‘Bertha thought of how wonderful it was to be overcome by a feeling of absolute bliss. Here questions and exclamations suggest that we are reading, not the words of the narrator, but the thoughts and opinions of Bertha, which are being channelled through the narrator. What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? We can see from the excerpt above that although the narrative voice begins with conventional reporting (‘Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk’), it quickly begins to take on the ‘feel’ and sound of a different person’s idiom: Bertha’s own: ![]() So-called ‘omniscient’ third-person narrators, as the word ‘omniscient’ indicates, are supposed to know everything, so they have little use for questions (although it’s true they may use rhetorical questions occasionally).Įxclamations, similarly, can sound too emotional, and therefore not in keeping with the usually dry, detached, level-headed ‘voice’ of an impersonal third-person narrator. One of the easiest ways of spotting free indirect style in a work of fiction is the use of questions and exclamations. Oh, is there no way you can express it without being ‘drunk and disorderly’? How idiotic civilisation is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle? What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? … First, consider this example, the opening paragraphs from Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Bliss’ (1918):Īlthough Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at – nothing – at nothing, simply. Let’s turn from a made-up illustrative example of free indirect discourse to some examples of the real thing, taken from proper writers who’ve actually written works of literature and such.
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