Free Indirect Style: A Theory
Poetry news: my poem Prelude to a Storm: The British Expeditionary Force, 1939-1940 appeared this week in Talk to Me in Long Lines. And American Independence in Verse is available wherever books are sold.
Free Indirect Style is a technique for communicating a character’s thoughts, feelings, or perspective. This technique, some say, is definitive of the modern novel. James Woods explains how it works, in his popular book How Fiction Works. First he shows us a passage that does not use free indirect style:
He looked over at his wife. “She looks so unhappy,” he thought, “almost sick.” He wondered what to say.
Here a man’s thoughts are marked explicitly as his, twice by the use of quotation marks, and once by attribution (“He wondered…”). Neither of these accompanies a character’s thoughts, when they are conveyed through free indirect style. To illustrate the difference, Woods re-writes the passage:
He looked at his wife. Yes, she was tiresomely unhappy again, almost sick. What the hell should he say?
And then Woods summarizes:
This is free indirect speech or style: the husband’s internal speech of thought has been freed of its authorial flagging; no “he said to himself “or “he wondered” or “he thought.”
And that’s it, right? Whatever there is to say, about how free indirect style may be used or abused, what it is is clear enough.
But as he goes on, Woods begins to rhapsodize, he begins making deep pronouncements:
Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge—which is free indirect style itself—between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance.
Here free indirect style sounds like a schedule I narcotic. Why drop acid when you can inhabit omniscience and partiality at once—just by reading Jane Austen?
So okay I don’t get it. When I read
He looked at his wife. Yes, she was tiresomely unhappy again, almost sick. What the hell should he say?
I see how I “inhabit partiality”: I learn how things are, from the man’s perspective—he thinks his wife is unhappy. But how do I also “inhabit omniscience”? That would entail a direct knowledge of how things are. But whatever I know here of this man’s wife, I know from trusting him. And how does free indirect style “draw attention to” the distance between author and character? When I read “What the hell should he say?”, my attention is not drawn to the author at all.
Woods also discusses this bit from Make Way For Ducklings: