How do narratives give us access to the thoughts and feelings – in short, the points of view – of characters who are not themselves the narrator (or narrators)? Broadly speaking, they do this in one of two ways (and often through a combination of these two ways): they can record the words, thoughts, opinions and concerns of those characters in direct discourse or they can do this in indirect discourse.
In direct discourse, the narrator repeats the actual words spoken or thoughts thought by a character and places them in quotation marks, sometimes with something along the lines of a ‘he said’ or ‘she thought’ added for extra clarity. This technique is the closest we can get to hearing what individual characters might actually think and say without their words and thoughts being moderated by or mediated through the narrator. As such, it can give us access to points of view and ways of interpreting the situation that might even undermine those interpretations the narrator would have us adopt.
Consider, for instance, the following passage:
My husband, Stephen, was the most selfish and inconsiderate person I had ever known. It was almost as if I did not exist and represented little more than a – not especially comfortable – piece of furniture to him. ‘Hello darling,’ he would call out cheerily every evening when I came home from work. ‘How was your day? Would you like me to cook you a nice meal? If you like, I can drive you to your favourite restaurant? Or perhaps you would like a trip to the theatre with your friends? I can be your chauffeur.’ What he meant was: what are you doing here intruding on my space? Couldn’t you have spent longer at work?
The alternative to direct discourse is (perhaps unsurprisingly) indirect discourse. This can take a number of different forms. In its simplest manifestation, it involves the narrator reporting – usually in the form of summarising – what a character is thinking or feeling without quoting those thoughts or feelings directly and without using such qualifiers as ‘he said’ or ‘she thought.’ A common example would go something like this
When Janet came home, Stephen was – as always – delighted to see her. He knew things had been tough at work recently and wondered if there was anything special he could do for her to reward her for her obvious industry and effort.
Several narratives use a third technique in order to give us access to some of their characters’ thoughts and feelings and thus focalise the action through them. This lies somewhere between direct and indirect discourse and is usually referred to as free indirect discourse.
In passages of free indirect discourse, a character’s voice (i.e. the way they talk and/or think) more or less takes over the narrative, yet not quite to the extent that they become the narrator. In such passages, that is, the word choice and sentence structure typical of that character – as well as the outlook – becomes the style in which the thoughts and speeches attributed to them are expressed. These thoughts and words are not, however, placed in quotation marks or rendered in direct speech. Neither do we ever entirely lose sight (or sound) of the narratorial voice, but we remain aware of their presence as someone mediating and to some degree ventriloquising the thoughts and feelings of the characters they represent.
In the following example, the thoughts and feelings of our protagonist Janet are presented in the first sentence in direct discourse, in the second sentence in indirect discourse and finally in the third sentence in free indirect discourse:
‘My day at work was absolutely awful,’ Janet replied, ‘as it was always bound to be and as you probably could have guessed even without asking.’ She was reminded once again of her impression of Stephen the first time they met. His charisma had always been – well, how might one put it? – underwhelming, to say the least.
(That the third sentence is in indirect discourse would be even more evident if we had read the rest of the story – assuming it really existed – and were accustomed to Janet’s penchant for phrases like ‘how might one put it?’ and ‘to say the least’).
Many examples of free indirect discourse (like the one given just now) tend still to summarise, report and to a certain extent mimic (or, to use what is perhaps a more neutral term, ventriloquise) the voices of individual characters in order to give a sense of how things look from their point of view. During the modernist period in particular, however, writers strove to go beyond reporting and ventriloquising characters’ thoughts and tried to develop ways of ventriloquising the way in which they thought those thoughts – which is to say, they tried to represent how those thoughts popped up in their characters’ heads whilst they were still in the process of thinking – as well. This radical form of free indirect discourse is commonly referred to as stream of consciousness.
Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is one of the supreme examples of this technique. Here is a short sample from near the beginning of the novel (the action is at this point being focalised through the central figure of Clarissa Dalloway herself):
How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”— was that it? —“I prefer men to cauliflowers”— was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished — how strange it was! — a few sayings like this about cabbages.
For almost the whole of this passage we not only see the world through Mrs Dalloway’s eyes (or rather – if we are to be more precise – through her memories), but the experience of living in that world is cast in words and associations that are entirely her own. At the same time, Mrs Dalloway by no means acts as the narrator of this passage. Rather, we remain constantly aware of another voice standing behind the scenes, pulling the strings and orchestrating the voices it records into a composite whole. This is the voice of the narrator, who in this passage reminds us of her presence subtly but surely through her intervention ‘for a girl of eighteen she then was,’ which acts somewhat in the manner of a footnote or editorial comment. Mrs Dalloway’s voice is not the voice of this passage, that is, but one of two or three contributors (Peter Walsh and the narrator being others) to this play of voices, this multiplicity of focal points and focalizers.
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