What Is Free Indirect Discourse? | Definition & Examples
- Melchior Antoine
- Jul 26
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 2
Free indirect discourse (which can be abbreviated to FID) helps achieve verisimilitude in that it allows the author to demonstrate how a character thinks instead of telling the audience how. It’s a classic example of “show, don’t tell.” So what exactly is free indirect discourse?
Free indirect discourse is a narrative technique where the thoughts of a character in first-person are expressed through the omniscient voice of the narrator in third-person. It is a blend between third-person narration and first-person direct speech, retaining the essence of first-person speech while technically remaining a third-person perspective.
The technique is also known as free indirect speech or free indirect style; in French, it is called discours indirect libre. It is rather similar to stream of consciousness, where the author presents the world through the perspective of the freely wandering mind of a character. However, with free indirect discourse, the author is much more restrained in allowing us into the mind and thinking of the character.
In this article, we discuss how to write using free indirect discourse and use examples from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Plus, we briefly discuss the difference between free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness.
Free Indirect Discourse in Jane Austen
Jane Austen is universally credited as being among the first authors to use free indirect discourse in her novels consistently. Pride and Prejudice (1813) was the novel where she masters the use of this narrative technique.
Let’s take a look at an extract from the novel:
Elizabeth listened in silence, but was not convinced. Their behavior at the assembly had not been calculated to please in general; and with more quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister, and with a judgment, too, unassailed by any attention to herself, she was very little disposed to approve them. They were, in fact, very fine ladies; not deficient in good-humor when they were pleased, nor in the power of being agreeable when they chose it; but proud and conceited. They were rather handsome; had been educated in one of the first private seminaries in town; had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds; were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people of rank; and were, therefore, in every respect entitled to think well of themselves and meanly of others. They were of a respectable family in the North of England, circumstances more deeply impressed on their memories than that their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade.
The character Elizabeth doesn’t agree with her sister who has too much of a “pliancy of temper” that a certain group of women would make for good neighbors. Austen ostensibly uses third-person narration to express how Elizabeth thinks. Nothing expressed in this passage is the opinion of Jane Austen, the omniscient narrator. Instead, the passage provides the unfiltered worldview and thinking of the character in question in all its flaws and contours.
Jane Austen is relying on irony to achieve her intended effect. Instead of having the author intrude and tell us that Elizabeth’s thinking is shallow, absurd, or confused, we are allowed to see this for ourselves. In short, the author is putting ultimate trust in the intelligence of her readers. For example, take a look at the following sentence from the passage:
and with more quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister, and with a judgment, too, unassailed by any attention to herself, she was very little disposed to approve them.
This is Elizabeth comparing her own powers of assessing people with those of her sister. It is obvious that the extravagant way in which she describes her judgment and abilities is superior to her sister means that she is callow and thinks too highly of her people-assessment abilities. We can think of Elizabeth in this sense as an unreliable narrator. She believes everything that she's thinking, but is too immature to be trusted in her views.
Lastly, her evaluation of the women under scrutiny ends with admitting that they were “in every respect entitled to think well of themselves and meanly of others.” This betrays the character’s own superficial sense of class and status. Jane Austen does not intrude and tell us any of those things about Elizabeth. Instead, she enters the character’s mind and allows her to reveal those things about herself by showing us how her mind operates.
Free Indirect Discourse in Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert, a French writer, was another pioneer of free indirect discourse. One of the earliest works in which he uses FID consistently is Madame Bovary (published in 1856). Madame Bovary is an unusually attractive woman from a humble background with a romantic sensibility, which leads to her downfall.
Here is an excerpt that uses FID to demonstrate how Madame Bovary thinks. But first, let’s set the scene. A few days earlier, she had attended a ball and got to experience the wealth and splendor associated with French high society. She meets and dances with a wealthy and mysterious stranger known as The Viscount, who gifts her a green silk cigar case:
Often when Charles was out she took from the cupboard, between the folds of the linen where she had left it, the green silk cigar case. She looked at it, opened it, and even smelt the odour of the lining — a mixture of verbena and tobacco. Whose was it? The Viscount's? Perhaps it was a present from his mistress. It had been embroidered on some rosewood frame, a pretty little thing, hidden from all eyes, that had occupied many hours, and over which had fallen the soft curls of the pensive worker. A breath of love had passed over the stitches on the canvas; each prick of the needle had fixed there a hope or a memory, and all those interwoven threads of silk were but the continuity of the same silent passion. And then one morning the Viscount had taken it away with him. Of what had they spoken when it lay upon the wide-mantelled chimneys between flower-vases and Pompadour clocks? She was at Tostes; he was at Paris now, far away! What was this Paris like? What a vague name! She repeated it in a low voice, for the mere pleasure of it; it rang in her ears like a great cathedral bell; it shone before her eyes, even on the labels of her pomade-pots.
The first two sentences in the passage represent the narrator’s objective voice. However, after the em dash, we see the author slipping into the mind of Madame Bovary and shows us exactly how her mind operates, and by extension, it reveals the type of person she is.
Madame Bovary is a romantic, and she isn’t simply a shallow romantic. She has all the deep feeling and sensitivity of a poet. She is the daughter of a farmer, true. Nonetheless, she has enough refinement to discern the “mixture of verbena and tobacco” that the case is made of. Her imagination runs wild and she fancies that the tobacco case was gifted to The Viscount by one of her mistresses.
Her high level of sensitivity and romance reaches a peak when she thinks “A breath of love had passed over the stitches on the canvas; each prick of the needle had fixed there a hope or a memory, and all those interwoven threads of silk were but the continuity of the same silent passion.” This passage at once shows us how much of a sensitive romantic Madame Bovary is and in a sense foreshadows her own sad fate.
The hope and memories that she ends up placing in a man to whom she is a mistress will eventually be taken away and discarded as The Viscount does with the gift that his imagined mistress gave him.
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Free indirect discourse vs. stream of consciousness
Free indirect discourse bears some similarity with stream of consciousness, and in literary analysis, it might be difficult to distinguish between the two. However, stream of consciousness is more radical in terms of how it breaks away from the narrator and fully occupies the perspective of the character. It doesn’t just show us the narrator coloring the narration with the thoughts of the character. Instead, it shows us the messy and dynamic way in which the human mind operates in real time.
Here is a short passage from Margaret Atwoods’ The Handmaid’s Tale (published in 1985). In the passage, the character Offred is in seclusion and isolation in a room. She notices the objects in the room:
A window, two white curtains. Under the window, a window seat with a little cushion . . . I can smell the polish. There’s a rug on the floor, oval, of braided rags. This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use. A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
Offred’s mind moves from one object to the next in the room. Notice how the first two sentences are not even complete sentences. They are fragments, mimicking the way the character takes a mental note of each object in the room. The objects in her mind become infected with the sense of unease and anxiety that she is suffering from.
You should also note how the passage is written completely in first person narrative. The author’s narrative voice is gone here. Instead, we are invited to see how Offred sees the world through her mind or stream of thinking.
As it were, the objects in the room are caught up in her flow of thinking and this flow crystallizes into an observation or question that gives voice to the anxiety that she experiences. She feels inadequate, used, and discarded. The rug made up of used rags is like a mirror reflecting that fact to her subconscious. This leads her to question whether she is not “being wasted.”
In all this, the narrator steps back and allows these impressions to be made on the reader by simply following the character’s trail of thinking. In free direct discourse, the process is not so methodical and involved. The author simply contents themselves with infecting the narrator’s voice with the perspective of a specific character.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, July 26). What Is Free Indirect Discourse? | Definition & Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/free-indirect-discourse |
