Free indirect discourse is a narrative voice that blends third-person narration with a character's interior speech.
Free indirect discourse — style indirect libre in French — collapses the distance between narrator and character. Instead of 'She thought, How dull this party is,' the prose simply says, 'God, this party was dull.' The narrator borrows the character's voice, vocabulary, and judgments without surrendering authorial control. Gustave Flaubert refined the technique in 'Madame Bovary' (1857), letting Emma's romantic clichés colour the narration with quiet irony. Jane Austen had used it earlier with subtler cunning. Today it is the default voice of literary fiction — used by Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Sally Rooney — because it solves an old problem elegantly: how to be inside a mind and outside it at the same time, which is what fiction has always wanted to do.