Free Indirect Style Gymnastics

When writing in free indirect style, an author conveys a character’s thoughts, feelings, or mental state, without explicitly marking that this is happening: no “he thought,” or “she wondered,” or anything like that. This passage from Kafka’s The Castle provides an example of the technique:

At that moment Barnabas stopped. Where were they? Was this the end of the road? would Barnabas leave K.? He wouldn’t succeed. K. clutched Barnabas’ arm so firmly that he almost hurt himself.

Here the main character, K., wonders where he and Barnabas are, wonders if they are at the end of the road and if Barnabas will leave him, and assures himself that he won’t, before clutching Barnabas’s arm. But to communicate the first episode of wondering Kafka does not write “K wondered where they were,” or “‘Where are we?’ K. wondered”; instead he uses the bare “Where were they?”

I wrote in an earlier essay about how literary critics and literary theorists tend toward mysticism when writing about free indirect style. And I suggested a simple way to describe free indirect style without mysticism or metaphor: when you read a passage in free indirect style, what you imagine comes apart from what you know to be fictional in the story. What you imagine matches the character’s perspective, even if that perspective is limited or mistaken, and so does not line up with what is fictional. “He wouldn’t succeed,” in the passage quoted above, is in free indirect style: when you read it, you imagine that he (Barnabas) won’t succeed, but it is not fictional that he won’t. Instead it is fictional only that K. believes (or maybe just hopes) that he won’t. Similarly, when you read “Where were they?” you imagine wondering where Barnabas and K. are. But “Where were they?” isn’t something that could be fictional in the story in the first place; it is a question, and so of the wrong category. Instead, what is fictional is that K. wonders where they are.

It turns out that philosophers also go in for mental gymnastics when theorizing free indirect style. Or one philosopher anyway: Kendall Walton, in Mimesis as Make-Believe. He discusses a passage from another Kafka novel, The Trial: