Free indirect speech
Narratology & storytellingA technique fusing the character's voice into the narrator's, with no reporting verb or quotation marks.
Example
"He shrugged. What did he have to lose, after all? Nothing. Strictly nothing."
Free indirect speech reports words or thoughts without a reporting verb or subordination: "She closed the door. So that was their big news. To hell with them." Third person and narrative tense remain, but vocabulary, rhythm and judgments belong to the character — two voices sound in one sentence.
Perfected by Flaubert and Jane Austen, then generalized across the modern novel, it's the finest tool for sliding from narrative objectivity into a consciousness's subjectivity with no visible seam. It also enables irony: the narrator can let a character hang themselves with their own words, without comment.
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