How To Narrate - Free Indirect Discourse

 When I do what I think of as third person with attribution of thoughts, people say I am doing stream-of-consciousness. I look at James Joyce and William James, and I think either I am wrong or my reader is wrong. Here, I think my lack of formal training limits my understanding by a lack of vocabulary.

But I think What is Free Indirect Discourse from Raymond Malewitz, Oregon State University Associate Professor of American Literature, sets me right, and gives me the proper term.

Today, I want to talk to you about a fascinating point-of-view that blends first and third person perspectives: free indirect discourse.  In this point of view, a third-person narrator stops describing the worldview of a given character—telling us what he or she thinks—and instead presents that worldview as if it were the narrator’s.  As I like to think of it, free indirect discourse describes moments in a third-person narrative when the narrator becomes infected by the perspective of one of its characters. Here’s one example.  In John Steinbeck’s novella “The Red Pony,” the third chapter begins with the following description:

"In a mid-afternoon of spring, the little boy Jody walked martially along the brush-lined road toward his home ranch. Banging his knee against the golden lard bucket he used for school lunch, he contrived a good bass drum, while his tongue fluttered sharply against the teeth to fill in snare drums and occasional trumpets. Some time back the other members of the squad that walked so smartly from the school had turned into the various little canyons and taken the wagon roads to their own home ranches. Now Jody marched seemingly alone, with high lifted knees and pounding feet; but behind him there was a phantom army with great flags and swords, silent but deadly."

This passage starts in a traditional third-person way, in which an outside narrator describes the actions of a character—Jody. But the last line of this passage does something different.  Instead of describing to us what Jody is imagining—that he pretends he is marching in front of a “phantom army”—the narrator presents that army as if it were actually there—“silent, but deadly.” In other words, at this moment, we’re not seeing the world of a third-person narrator; we’re seeing the delightfully boyish worldview of Jody.

Yes, I think I get the point. My own handling is probably rougher (of course, it is rougher!). Something to think as I go forward.

Oregon State has more - The Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms.

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