Whose words are these?

A novelist can present a character’s thoughts without putting them in quotation marks or adding a phrase such as “she thought.” One technique, called free indirect speech, combines the grammar of third-person narration with language that reflects the character’s immediate experience.

Consider this invented example: Mara reached the station. The platform was empty. Wonderful—she had missed the train again! The opening sentences could belong to a detached narrator. The final sentence retains “she,” but its impatient exclamation sounds like Mara’s own reaction. Readers enter her perspective without an announcement that she is thinking.

[A] This blending can make a character’s feelings immediate. [B] It can also create distance between a character’s interpretation and the reader’s. [C] If earlier events have shown that Mara left home unnecessarily late, readers may question her implied sense of bad luck. [D] They hear her frustration while also recognizing something she does not acknowledge.

The technique thus allows closeness and irony to operate together. Identifying whose attitude a sentence expresses becomes part of reading the story. A strongly worded judgment within third-person narration may reveal a character’s assumptions rather than provide a statement by the narrator about what is true.