1. Parentheticals &
point of view in free
indiret style (FIS)
Diane Blakemore (2009)
Discussant: Joey Z. Balsomo, PhD student
De La Salle University Dasmariñas

2. Purpose
 The article focuses on the use of
parenthetical structures by writers of free
indirect style/thought (FIS)

3. Materials under Analysis
 The paper exhausts the examples from
Katherine Mansfield, Malcolm Lowry, and
Viriginia Woolf

4. Theoretical Framework
 Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) is used to
analyze the texts.
 It states that communicated information comes
with a guarantee of Optimal Relevance, so that
the invested effort of an audience in its
interpretation is rewarded by cognitive effects or
by an improvement to the mutual cognitive
environment (i.e. common knowledge) of
communicator and audience.

5. Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’
 Free indirect style is sometimes compared
to a narrative style in Japanese –non-
reportive style (Kuroda, 1973) – in which the
narrator identifies with the characters
involved in the described events so that we
view or witness events from their
perspective

6. Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’
 The author adopting this style
reveals/shows the thoughts or ‘inner
speech’ of his characters (Chatman, 1978; Ehrlich,
1990) rather than tell the reader what those
characters thought and did.
 No one has a direct line to another person’s
thoughts.

7. Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’
 Public utterances are not ‘inner speech’ but
are evidence from which we can derive
meta-representations of someone’s
thoughts and his state of mind.

8.  In FIS the linguistic evidence that the
author provides for a character’s thought
cannot be seen as a quasi-verbatim
representation of actual utterances or
speech or of actual thought.
 FIS material is a representation of a
character’s expressions or thoughts.

9. Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’
 The literature on FIS draws the attention to the
use of Speaker Oriented expressions and
constructions such as expressive adjectives,
expressive epithets, and parentheticals.
 These are speaker oriented because whatever
they communicate must be attributed to the
speaker even when they are used in an utterance
which attributes a thought to another person.
 EXTRACT 26

10. Extract 26
 He would go to Clarissa’s party, because
he wanted to ask Richard what they were
doing in India – the conservative duffers.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1976

11. Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’
 NOTE: a speaker may not necessarily
engaged in a communicative act, he may
be engaged in an act of thinking

12. Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’
 Contextual assumptions is used in
processing FIS utterances in order to
recover information
 EXTRACT 28

13. Extract 28
 As for Buckingham Palace (like an old
prima donna facing the audience all in
white) you can’t deny it a certain dignity, he
considered, nor despise what it does, after
all, stand to millions of people (a little crowd
was waiting at the gate to see the King
drive out) for a symbol, absurd though it is.
(Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 1976)

14. Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’
 FIS includes expressions and constructions
which do not correspond to conceptual
constituents of thoughts but which simply
serve as a means of triggering a process
that yields an impression of a character’s
state of mind.

15. Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’
 The use of expressive adjectives (damn),
epithets (the bastard), and exclamations
(God almighty!) do not encode concepts,
but rather reveal… the perspective from
which the utterance is made;’ thus, ‘have a
dramatic impact on how current and future
utterances are perceived (Potts, 2007).

16. Focus 2: Role of the Narrator in FIS
 (Examples of passages are authorial in origin. They provide
backdrop for the discussion of the parenthetical phenomena)
 In FIS the narrator uses deictic expressions
which indicate current time or proximate
referents even though the fictional world is
located in the past and in a distal location
 (31) and (32)

17. Extract 31
 How continually, how startingly, the
landscape changed. Now the fields were
full of stones.
(Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1962)

18. Extract 32
 And the echo came back: ‘Orio – Why, the
mad pictures of the wolves!
He had forgotten they were here.
(Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1962)

19. Focus 2: Role of the Narrator in FIS
 The narrator may use a distal
demonstrative (that) with a character’s
proximate demonstrative (this) in order to
intrude on the character’s thoughts
 (33)

20. Extract 33
 It was her deep distrust of her husband –
this was what darkened the world.
That was a sentiment easily indicated, but
not so easily explained.
(James, Portrait of a Lady,(James, Portrait of a Lady, 1936)

21. Focus 3: Parentheticals
 Self-interruptions, digressions, and
revisions are characteristics of
spontaneous, unplanned discourse.
 A speaker may be prompted to interrupt his
own utterance because of an event or state
of affair in the environment which is
perceived by the speaker as requiring an
immediate response.

22. Focus 3: Parentheticals
 Ex. an utterance of ‘Fire’ during a lecture or
‘Pass me a pen’ in the middle of telephone
conversation.
 An author whose aim is to represent
thoughts which themselves are unplanned
should produce utterances containing
similar kinds of interruptions and revisions.
 Consider (37)

23. Extract 37
 But just at that moment steps sounded,
and, looking in the mirrow, she saw George
bowing in the doorway. How queerly he
smiled! It was the mirror, of course. She
turned round quickly. His lips curled back in
a sort of grin, and – wasn’t he unshaved? –
he looked almost green in the face.
(Mansfield, ‘Revelations,’ The Collected Short Stories, 1981)

24. Focus 3: Parentheticals
 Author provides parentheticals to:
 capture the difficulties a character has when he
experiences a feeling which he does not
recognize or which surprises him;
 capture the intensity of a feeling or thought a
character is feeling,
 Capture the way that the train of a character’s
thoughts may be interrupted because it reminds
him of another or simply because he has just
noticed something in the environment.

25. Focus 3: Parentheticals
 Parentheticals allow the reader to gain an
impression that he is recovering a more
accurate meta-representation of a
character’s thoughts and though processes
– an impression of affective mutuality
between himself and a fictional character

26. Focus 3: Parentheticals
 The author may establish the sort of
dissociation that is required for irony.

27. Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts
 Parentheticals is pragmatically integrated
with its host in the sense that the
assumptions they communicate alter the
context for its interpretation.
 (8)

28. Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts
 The and-parenthetical refines the
audience’s search for the contextual
assumptions which enable them to interpret
the repetition in the host.
 (44)

29. Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts
 Parenthetical (used as a descriptive
commentary by the author) allows the
reader to recover a meta-representation of
a character’s thought and a
metarepresentation of the processes
involved in having it; thus, increasing the
sense of immediacy or affective mutuality
between reader and character
 (45)

30. Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts
 Parenthetical commentary ensures that the
reader not only recovers a meta-
representation of a character’s thought, but
also a meta-representation of a character’s
emotions as he has this thought
 (46)

31. Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts
 Parenthetical commentary provides the
reader a physical context in which the
character is engaged in thought
 (47)

32. Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts
 Parentheticals may also play a role in
shifting the focus from one perspective to
another. In Some cases, they simply
establish a contrast between two different
points of view.
 (48)

33. Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts
 Parenthetical establishes a distance or
dissociation between two subjects of
consciousness so that one places the other
in a ludicrous light.
 (49)

34. Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts
 In (49), the parenthetical ironically
described the character.

35. Conclusion
 FIS contains features enabling the author to
establish the illusion of a direct line
between the reader and the character, or
 A sense of affective mutuality between
reader and character
 The effort in the interpretation of an FIS text
is rewarded by an increased sense of
intimacy between reader and character.

36. Conclusion
 There are features of FIS that lead to an
increased sense of mutuality between reader and
author, and a corresponding impression of
distance between reader and character.
 The reader is rewarded by a sense of absurdity
and a sense of collusion with the author – for
example, ironic forms of address, the use of
vocabulary that is more characteristic of the
narrator than of the character whose thoughts are
being represented.

37. Conclusion
 Parentheticals in FIS play both type of role
 The interruptions, revisions and digressions
contribute to the sense of affective
mutuality between reader and character

38. Conclusion
 Parentheticals that describe the context in
which a character is having the thoughts
represeted can encourage the reader to
create meta-representations of thoughts not
actually revealed by the narrator, thereby
increasing the sense of intimacy between
reader and character.

39. Conclusion
 Parentheticals can also be used to place a
character’s thoughts in a ludicrous light
thereby contributing to a sense of ironic
distance between reader and this
character.
 The reader may feel that in recognizing this
impression of absurdity he is in collusion
with the author.

40. Conclusion
 Parentheticals play an important role in
enabling the narrator to represent thoughts
from a variety of perspective – including his
own.