English Literature / Unit 2 ENL 0124 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Free Indirect Discourse
Captions available
The idea
Free indirect discourse renders a character's thoughts in the third-person narrator's voice, without quotation marks or "she thought," so the narrator's sentence takes on the character's idiom. Jane Austen, with Goethe, was among the first novelists to use it consistently, and it lets irony run between narrator and character.
In practice
Narrator's grammar, character's mind.
Where people slip
This definition rests on one reference source.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for English Literature