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The Wikipedia entry on Free Indirect Speech quotes Norman Page's 1972 analysis of a passage from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility:

[1] Mrs John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. [2] To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy, would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. [3] She begged him to think again on the subject. [4] How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?

Page explains that "the first [1st] sentence is straight narrative, in the 'voice' of the [narrator]; the third [3rd] sentence is normal indirect speech; but the second [2nd] and fourth [4th] are what is usually described as free indirect speech." In these two sentences, Austen presents the interior thoughts of the character and creates the illusion that the reader is entering the character's mind.

Jane Austen's usage is so easy to follow that most readers probably don't even notice it. But in Thomas Pynchon's latest novel Shadow Ticket, there are some examples that are harder.

As you can learn from Wikipedia's plot summary, Hicks McTaggart "is a private detective […] given the assignment to track down Daphne Airmont, daughter of the reclusive 'Al Capone of Cheese' Bruno Airmont, alongside Hop Wingdale, a clarinetist for the swing band The Klezmopolitans and Daphne's paramour."

As of the start of Chapter 26, the Klezmopolitans have broken up, and Daphne has been searching for Hop. The chapter starts with a long sentence, catching us up with her travels:

For a while Daphne, flown into a dither, was chasing all over the map, trying to be there waiting wherever the puck might be on its way to but not always guessing right, along with wires going astray, trains running late, street-fighting and barricades to detour around and so forth, sleeping and eating when she can, usually within earshot of railway stations, steered along by tattered notices stuck onto public surfaces, helpful Swing Kids, Eukodal addicts with their own notions about the sequence and speed of passing events, Daphne continuing to run a train and a half, a day or a night or a street address behind, till eventually the charm wore off and she wound down to this pause in Budapest, where she figures to take a rest and wait to see if the band or any of its unknown fragments might find their way to her.

But then the next two sentences are

“…but perhaps I’m telling you more than I should…”

“I’m interested, really.”

…at which point we need to understand that this is a conversation between Daphne and Hicks, and that the 148 words of the chapter's opening sentence are her telling him the story in free-indirect-speech style. Aside from the length, another difference from the Jane Austen example (and most others) is that the third-person references represent first-person instances ("Daphne" == "I") rather than second-person* ("their dear little boy" == "our dear little boy", "How could he" == "How could you").

Pynchon's next sentence flips the point of view to Hicks, though still in the narrative 3rd person, presumably representing his thoughts rather than his speech:

Hicks could point out that keeping still and listening to a story isn’t always the same thing as falling for it, but sees no reason to start an argument, being no stranger to the time-honored routine men have had to sit through since the world has been the world, listening to desirable women banging on about their love-life history in hopes however remote of some payoff in the cheerfully jangling currency of present-tense whoopee.

*Yes, I know that "our" is actually first-person plural, not second-person — but in the Jane Austen example, it's used to encode a conversational reference to the interlocutor and the speaker combined, which is in some sense effectively "you".

October 14, 2025 @ 9:05 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Style and register

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