Thursday, July 2, 2015

I was just wondering if this was an example of free indirect discourse in Pride and Prejudice? "How differently did everything now appear in...

Free indirect discourse refers to narration that technically originates with a third-person narrator; however, that speech sounds an awful lot like a particular character in the story.  To put it differently, free indirect discourse presents the thoughts and feelings and even voice of a character through the actual narration presented by that third-person narrator.  Therefore, yes, the passage you have quoted is an example of free indirect discourse because it is the speech of the novel's third-person narrator, but that speech sounds so very much like the voice of Elizabeth Bennet that one might be tempted to assume or to state that it is actually her speaking.  The major clue that she is not the speaker is that she is referred to with the third-person pronoun just as other characters are.

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Thomas Jefferson's election in 1800 is sometimes called the Revolution of 1800. Why could it be described in this way?

Thomas Jefferson’s election in 1800 can be called the “Revolution of 1800” because it was the first time in America’s short history that pow...