Analyzing and Interpreting Literature / Unit 10 AIL 0920 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Austen's Opening as Free Indirect Discourse
Captions available
The idea
A collective opinion has been given in the narrator's own grammar, with no marker separating it. That is free indirect discourse operating on a whole community rather than one character, and it produces the irony without a single ironic word being used.
In practice
Irony with no ironic word.
Where people slip
The technique supplies the irony.
Your place on the trail
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