“Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.”
This opening line from James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead,” is an example of free indirect speech, narration that indicates a character’s internal thoughts and feelings without the use of quotation marks or “he said, he thought” reporting. But how does this line take us inside Lily’s thoughts?
It comes down to the one word “literally.”
As Hugh Kenner points out in his little book, Joyce’s Voices, the use of “literally” in this sentence has no literal reference. Lily, that is, is not literally run off her feet. She’s simply tired from having to go back and forth all the time answering the door. But “literally” is just the kind of word that Lily would use within her own thoughts. We can imagine her muttering to herself, as she runs for the tenth time down the hallway to the door, “I’m literally run off my feet!” It’s a figure of speech, hyperbole in miniature, that Joyce captures in what seems, at first blush, like plain vanilla narration.
What is the effect of free indirect speech?
That of bringing the voices of one’s characters into the narration itself. In free indirect speech, writes James Wood, the narrative “seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character, who now seems to “own” the words. The writer is free to inflect the reported thought, to bend it around the character’s own words.”
And in so doing, the author makes his narrative voice disappear.
“It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also.”
That’s not Joyce-the-Narrator’s voice. That’s Lily’s voice again, Joyce’s narration having taken on the properties of her character.
Free indirect speech is not the only narrative technique there is, but it’s a delightful one to employ, and one we often encounter in our reading without registering it.
What books or short stories do you know that make good use of free indirect speech?
Leave a Reply