What I’m going to write here is, I hope, a backup to other online resources — taking a usefully intuitive approach, rather than a grammatical one.
It’s a beginner’s guide. Forgive me if you already know this stuff.
I don’t often point students towards Wikipedia, but the entry there on Free Indirect Speech is a good start.
The first thing I’ll say is —
To use Free Indirect at all, you have to use it confidently.
This is because as well as being about word choice, it’s also about rhythm.
Rhythm is about being in the groove of being on the one of the writing, not about stepping back from it and musicologically analysing the rhythmic units of funk.
I’m not warning you off trying out Free Indirect. Definitely give it a go in something you’re writing where you think it might work. But don’t commit to a whole novel unless you’re already very secure in your writing of differing narrative voices.
What you need is a sense of the different ways third person and first person narrators address the reader.
Already, this sounds too formal.
You need to have been inside the self-consciously-doing-a-good-storytelling-job of the third person omniscient narrator, and also inside the doing-a-good-storytelling-job-partly-by-accident of the limited first person narrator.
If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, I’d look around a bit more before going all in on Free Indirect.
If you’re thinking, Well, that’s an okay explanation, Toby, but it leaves out that third person narrators can be idiosyncratic or slangy, and that first person narrators can be uptight and list-making — if you’re thinking something like that, you’re safe to go ahead.
The story I’ve long used to teach Free Indirect is George Saunders’ ‘The End of FIRPO in the World’. It’s easy enough to find online — it’s on the New Yorker website, because the magazine first published it in May 1998. It’s also in Saunders’ wonderful collection, Pastoralia. Which you should track down in a library, if not buy.
We’re going to read it together, to pick apart how it does Free Indirect.
You need to get your narrative antennae working. Your Spidey sense. Your attentive spine.
What you’re looking to do here is ask yourself, through your intuitions —
Where does this language come from? This specific word? Does it come from the third person narrator or from the main character, Cody, or do they somehow share it?
Because Free Indirect is usually about a shift in register.
Reading this story, you should think —
How would the narrator, as I’ve come to understand them, do this job if they were left to write it purely as themselves — without allowing Cody’s words or thought patterns in?
Then you should think —
How would Cody, as I know him, tell me the story if he were to speak it aloud, without any help in structuring or transitioning from the third person narrator?
If you are objecting to this, because surely we only know both through the story itself, then Free Indirect may not be for you.
Free Indirect is about joyous pollution.
In this story, it’s about the character’s head, their way of being in the world, unevenly flooding the usually more straightforward, perhaps a little bit dry, discourse of the third person narrator.
The best way to approach this is for you to do some homework. Or have some patience. We’ll resume tomorrow, for the close reading.
In between now and then, you should track down and read ‘The End of FIRPO in the World’ at least three times.
First time is just for pleasure.
Second time is to pick apart the narrative voices.
Third time is to print out, underline or highlight in different coloured pens, so that you identify what is the narrator’s language, what Cody’s and what is shared. Plus, what belongs to “someone else”.
Note: There are words in the story, such as ‘the’, that I’m not sure about. Maybe they come from Cody, maybe the narrator, maybe they are shared.
Question marks above words are fine. Maybe they’re part of the Free in Free Indirect.
Throughout this, I’d like you to bear in mind that this is not a difficult story to read.
It’s a breeze, though a chilly one.
If you weren’t doing this homework, you wouldn’t be snagged by these questions — not unless, which is quite possible, you are a reader who hasn’t read all that much Free Indirect.
If that’s the case, please be assured, this is a story very well worth struggling with.
See you tomorrow.