Narrative & Time
Free Indirect Discourse
Third-person narration that takes on a character's voice and judgments without quotation marks or 'she thought' tags. The character's mind arrives inside the narrator's sentences, and irony lives in the gap between the two.
"What a lark! What a plunge!" — Mrs. Dalloway's mind in the narrator's sentence
Don't confuse it with. Direct discourse quotes; indirect discourse reports ('she thought that…'); FID deletes the tag and lets the voices blend.
In the Reader — 5 excerpts
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster,
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut
He looked b.a. in it and for a moment even thought about wearing it to school.
Travels with
Devices that share a passage with free indirect discourse most often — company reveals character.
Anaphora 6 Parataxis 5 Chiasmus 4 Antithesis 3 Personification 3 Irony 3 Litotes 3 Hyperbole 3
The rest of the family
In Medias Res Prolepsis Analepsis Foreshadowing Stream of Consciousness Stichomythia