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How Does Niffengger Use Free Direct Language

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How Does Niffengger Use Free Direct Language
Within the extract, Niffengger uses a variety of the possible presentations of speech and thought, mainly including Indirect, Free Indirect and Narrative Presentation of Speech/Thought Acts. Due to the novel making use of a heterodiegetic narrator, there are also many narrative report of action clauses (NRAs). NRAs are described by Simpson (2003) as maintaining ‘the ongoing action of the story as well as providing an external framework around which the strands of speech and thought are woven’ (p24).
Niffengger gives us an insight into how the character Robert feels throughout the extract. When providing the reader with these insights, Niffengger tends to use a mixture of both free direct and free indirect clauses. For example, the free direct clause ‘How am I supposed to live without you?’ gives us a clear insight into how Robert is feeling as the reader can assume that despite it being merged in with the regular narrative, the text is expressing Roberts thoughts and feelings. …show more content…
We know this is free indirect as we are getting an insight into Roberts’ thoughts and feelings, without him directly telling us anything. Gibbons and Whiteley (forthcoming) define this more clearly by stating that ‘free indirect discourse does not feature reporting clauses or inverted commas (because it is free) but is presented in third-person’ (p67). By using free indirect discourse, Niffengger ‘creates the impression of narrational voice, while [the] freeness, on the other, appears to align the discourse with a particular character’s viewpoint’ (Gibbons and Whiteley,
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