FREE DIRECT SPEECH AND FREE INDIRECT SPEECH
In their attempts to portray the stream of thought of their characters, writers have modified the paradigm of reporting as outlined in certain ways.
What we call ‘free direct speech or thought’ consists in omitting the inverted commas or dashes which conventionally signal quoting, as seen in the extract from Mrs Dalloway. More drastically, the reporting clause is omitted altogether. This is called ‘free indirect speech’ and also covers cognitive processes. In addition, certain structures of direct speech are retained, such as direct questions and exclamations, vocatives, utterance-time adverbs such as now and tag questions. Other features may belong to indirect speech, however: tense back-shift, and the temporal and spatial shifts of deictic words towards remoteness.
Some of these features are present in the following extract from Joyce Carol Oates’ story Happy, which describes a girl’s journey home from the airport with her mother and her mother’s new husband.
They stopped for dinner at a Polynesian restaurant ten miles up the Turnpike, her mother explaining that there wasn’t anything decent to eat at home,1 also it was getting late, wasn’t it, tomorrow she’d be making a big dinner,2 That’s okay honey isn’t it?3 She and her new husband quarrelled about getting on the Turnpike then exiting right away, but at dinner they were in high spirits again, laughing a good deal, holding hands between courses, sipping from each other’s tall frosted bright-colored tropical drinks. Jesus I’m crazy about that woman,4 her mother’s new husband told the girl when her mother was in the powder room, Your mother is a high-class lady, he said.5 He shifted his cane chair closer, leaned moist and warm, meaty, against her, an arm across her shoulders. There’s nobody in the world precious to me as that lady, I want you to know that, he said,6 and the girl said Yes I know it,7 and her mother’s new husband said in a fierce voice close to tears, Damn right, sweetheart, you know it.8
1indirect speech; 2free indirect speech; 3free direct speech; 4–8direct speech
