In Their Own Words

Last week I was interested in the idea of “sympathy”—the way a story invites us into the world of its characters, how we naturally identify with protagonists, even those who are not “likeable,” and even when they are very different from ourselves. Arguably, the process of identification, the sense that we are immersed the story, is what makes a story fun. However, not all stories excel equally in this department, and there are many different tools an author can use to get us into the skins of their characters.

One of my favorite techniques is the free indirect style, sometimes called the “close third person.” This is quite different from the objective or omniscient third, can be thought of as both subjective and limited, but is distinctive in the degree to which it allows the character’s own language to infect the author’s—to such an extent, in fact, that the narrative becomes fluid, moving between the character’s language and the author’s (often more poetic) language, without barriers like quotation marks placed between. Such an approach provides that intensity most often associated with first-person narration while still leaving room for the author’s insightful observations or turns of phrase to shed light on the character that the character himself might not choose: Inelegant characters, for example can still be expressed elegantly without sacrificing closeness.

There are certain situations where this is a particularly useful storytelling technique. Right now I’m working on a story told largely from a dog’s point of view. I elected to write in the third person and use a number of free indirect moments because my goal is both to minimize barriers between human readers and the canine characters while at the same time give these creatures a form of expression they themselves are extremely unlikely to employ (that is, the dogs are relatively realistic dogs, not cartoon dogs). I am hardly the first person to do this; Paul Auster does a very similar thing in his “dog book,” Timbuktu, although his mangy protagonist is gifted with exceptional acumen and sensibility.

Another situation where a free indirect third can be quite useful is when the story’s point-of-view character is a child, allowing us to inhabit the world of children without sacrificing a sophisticated literary style—which would be difficult to swallow if the story was told instead in the first-person. A famous example can be found in Henry James's novel, What Maisie Knew, a tangled web of a tale about divorce and adultery told from a child’s perspective. James pulls off the stunt by confining his observations to things the child herself directly observes, often employing her own interpretations and words, without sacrificing any of that sensitive and concentrated style that is so distinctly his own.

For example, on hearing the Captain speak kindly of her mother, Maisie bursts into tears, as James describes it:

“She became on the spot indifferent to her usual fear of showing what in children was notoriously most offensive—presented to her companion, soundlessly but hideously, her wet distorted face. She cried, with a pang, straight at him, cried as she had never cried at anyone in all her life. ‘Oh do you love her?’ she brought out with a gulp because that was the effect of her trying not to make a noise.

“It was doubtless another consequence of the thick mist through which she saw him that in reply to her question the Captain gave her such a queer blurred look.”

The first sentence describing Maisie’s tears is James describing with an adult perspective the effect of her weeping, but the second sentence is all Maisie, feeling the cry inside herself and the motion of her cry “at” the Captain. That “at” is Maisie’s word, as is the “noise” she’s trying not to make. You can almost imagine an adult in Maisie’s memory admonishing, “Oh don’t make such a noise!” Finally, the “queer blurred look” is Maisie’s innocent perception which James knowingly leaves his readers free to interpret with their more nuanced understanding of the Captain’s position.

James’s voice and Maisie’s have completely overlapped and become inseparable. Of course, this is not unusual for this writer, considering the frequency with which James employs a “stream of consciousness” throughout his stories, where a series of thoughts, winding ever deeper, erase the lines between author and character: their voices meld and become one. Other authors employ a similar technique and to an even greater extent allow the characters to completely take over during such moments. Virginia Woolf, for instance, certainly mastered the “stream of consciousness” technique, and I would consider her use to be one form of free indirect style.

James Joyce is another, more subtle master of the free indirect narrative. When reading Joyce there is a sense that every word was selected in deliberate reflection not only of how his characters perceive the world, but of how they assume their own purpose (or loss of purpose) within that world. A transformation of these perceptions almost always forms the dramatic climax in Joyce’s short stories. This week's podcast is one such short story, “A Painful Case,” which appears in Joyce’s iconic collection, The Dubliners. You can get the same text I read for free from Project Gutenberg, or, if you'd rather have the collection in hand, try your public library, or buy a copy of The Dubliners for your home library: