Meanings
- uncountableSynonym of free indirect speech.
Free indirect discourse, then, can be seen to be the novelistic technique that enables the development of sympathy as a formal strategy.
2002, Clara Tuite, Romantic Austen, Cambridge University Press, page 682 more examples
1993, Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2005, Taylor & Francis e-Library, page 4, Banfield, like most free indirect discourse studies in English, is blithely unaware of the findings presented by nearly a century of German criticism.
2000, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text, Cheryl A. Wall (editor, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Oxford University Press, page 103, I use the word double here intentionally, to echo W. E. B. Du Bois's metaphor for the Afro-American's peculiar psychology of citizenship and also to avoid the limited description of free indirect discourse as a "dual voice," in Roy Pascal's term. Rather than a dual voice, free indirect discourse, as manifested in Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a dramatic way of expressing a divided self.
Synonyms: free indirect speech
Synonyms & antonyms
nounSynonym of free indirect speech.
Cite this entry
free indirect discourse. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/free%20indirect%20discourse
“free indirect discourse.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/free%20indirect%20discourse. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “free indirect discourse,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/free%20indirect%20discourse.
Source: free indirect discourse on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.