Free Indirect Discourse

Free indirect discourse is a special way of conveying a character's speech or thoughts that combines features of direct and indirect speech: formally the utterance belongs to the narrator (third person, past tense), but in its vocabulary, intonation, and emotional coloring it conveys the hero's inner speech, his view, and his assessment. Through this the voices of the author and the character merge, and the reader sees the event simultaneously from outside and from within the hero's consciousness. Free indirect discourse is a subtle means of psychologism that allows one to move imperceptibly from objective narration to subjective experience. It was masterfully used in world prose by Gustave Flaubert, and in Ukrainian literature by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Olha Kobylianska, and Valerian Pidmohylny, whose prose attained high psychological nuance. This device is one of the most refined achievements of realist and modern narrative technique.