Roy Pascal cites
Goethe and
Jane Austen as the first novelists to use this style consistently, and writes that
Gustave Flaubert was the first to be aware of it as a style. This style would be widely imitated by later authors, called in
French discours indirect libre. It is also known as
estilo indirecto libre in Spanish, and is often used by Latin American writer
Horacio Quiroga. In
German literature, the style, known as
erlebte Rede (experienced speech), is perhaps most famous in the works of
Franz Kafka, blurring the subject's first-person experiences with a grammatically third-person narrative perspective.
Arthur Schnitzler's
novella Leutnant Gustl first published in
Neue Freie Presse newspaper in
1900 is considered the earliest book length example. In
Danish literature, the style is attested since
Leonora Christina (1621–1698) (and is, outside literature, even today common in colloquial Danish speech). Some of the first sustained examples of free indirect discourse in Western literature occur in
Latin literature, where the phenomenon often takes the name of
oratio obliqua. It is characteristic, for instance, of the style of
Julius Caesar, but it is also found in the historical work of
Livy.
English, Irish and Scottish literature As stated above, Austen was one of its first practitioners. According to Austen scholar Tom Keymer, "It has been calculated that
Pride and Prejudice filters its narrative, at different points, through no fewer than nineteen centres of consciousness, more than any other Austen novel (with
Mansfield Park, at thirteen, the nearest competitor)." It also appears in
Harper Lee’s
To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), where the words of various characters are filtered through the point of view of the young narrator,
Scout Finch. Irish author
James Joyce also used free indirect speech in works such as "The Dead" (in
Dubliners),
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and
Ulysses. Scottish author
James Kelman uses the style extensively, most notably in his
Booker Prize winning novel
How Late It Was, How Late, but also in many of his short stories and some of his novels, most of which are written in
Glaswegian speech patterns.
Virginia Woolf in her novels
To the Lighthouse and
Mrs Dalloway frequently relies on free indirect discourse to take us into the minds of her characters. Another
modernist,
D. H. Lawrence, also makes frequent use of a free indirect style in "transcribing unspoken or even incompletely verbalized thoughts". Lawrence most often uses free indirect speech, a literary technique that describes the interior thoughts of the characters using third-person singular pronouns ('he' and 'she') in both
The Rainbow and
Women in Love. According to Charles Rzepka of Boston University,
Elmore Leonard's mastery of free indirect discourse "is unsurpassed in our time, and among the surest of all time, even if we include
Jane Austen,
Gustave Flaubert, and
Hemingway in the mix." Some argue that free indirect discourse was also used by
Chaucer in
The Canterbury Tales. When the narrator says in "The
General Prologue" that he agrees with the Monk's opinion dismissing criticism of his very unmonastic way of life, he is apparently paraphrasing the monk himself: :And I
seyde his opinion was good: :What! Sholde he studie, and make himselven
wood, :Upon a book in
cloistre alwey to
poure? :Or
swinken with his handes, and laboure, :As
Austin bit? How shal the world be served? :Lat Austin have his swink to him reserved! These
rhetorical questions may be regarded as the monk's own casual way of waving off criticism of his aristocratic lifestyle. Similar examples can be found in the narrator's portrait of the friar. ==See also==