In any decent literature, the point of view being used in a text shapes the bigger picture or creates a rhythm for the whole story—interesting POV is the meat of a good book. POV influences the art and craft of writing as it impacts not just the choice of words or the structure of sentences, but also allows readers to get into a character’s head. If your hobbies include reading novels, there is a high chance that you have encountered a writing style in which an author seems to write in a third-person narrative, but somehow also co-opted the persona of an active first-person voice, taking direct speech and combining it with indirect passive commentary.
Did you know that such combination as mentioned above is called free indirect style? Free indirect style is the practice of embedding a character’s speech or thoughts into an otherwise third-person narrative. This peculiar method of stylizing a writing has the purpose of controlling the distance between readers and characters. Since free indirect style moves back and forth between thinking and conscious thoughts, without much distinction which is which or which thought belongs to whom, it can almost feel like the text is sharing two brains: the narrator’s and the characters’—the barriers between them can almost vanish or become indistinguishable as the middleman has been removed. The audiences, as hermeneutists who are looking for hidden messages, are left to analyze unconscious, rather than “actual”, motives.
Free indirect style provides the author with both access and liability. One benefit of using free indirect style is that the author will not be limited by the scope of third-person narrative, which usually relies on outward report-like observation (not an “inside scoop”). The free style allows narrator to dig deep into a character’s emotions, monologues, and internal life without permanently tied to that person’s point of view/perspective. The author will then have a greater liberty in conveying the inner dialogues of the character, rather than relying on exchanges between multiple different characters. Isn’t it neat? I personally think free style is a more comprehensive way of telling a story compared to the conventional method of narrating a story—it is good for building up the character’s development because the readers will get to see more penetrating insights into the character’s idiosyncrasies and typical behavior. It can almost feel too revealing and almost unrealistically omniscient, though. It is a privy yet subtle description of a character’s feelings, vocabulary, experience, utterance, and opinion. The tensions between voices can be randomly fragmented.
Free indirect style has been around since at least the 19th century (or maybe even the 14th century, with Chaucer’s Canterbury as the pioneer). Free style is characterized by implicit rather than explicit tone changes, because the style demands the author to throw a statement in a descriptive sentence that may otherwise belongs to the character. No wonder authors like Jane Austen, Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Kafka loved to use free indirect style in their literary work! I mean, c’mon, why wouldn’t they love using it when taking advantage of it leads to less use of distracting quotes and more opportunities to move from speech to actions? On the other hand, the seamlessness of the free style could also leave readers with a difficult question: where does the author’s voice end and the narrator’s or character’s voice begin and where do they overlap, if ever? The once clear lines have now been blurred. As a stylistic device, the free indirect style leaves very little room for degrees of separation.
