Reader responses to narrative point of view

This empirical study addresses a problem in the analysis of free indirect style, one of the linguistic forms used for the presentation of narrative viewpoint. Free indirect style, or the presentation of speech, thought and perception has been a contentious issue in linguistic and literary scholarship inviting conflicting theoretical accounts. The empirical study reported here contributes to this debate by presenting reader responses to point of view in a passage from Sons and Lovers, with the aim of replacing critics’ idealisations of the form and function of free indirect style with real readers’ interpretations. I discuss the results from the experiment in light of two hypotheses put forward for the interpretation of the style: the single and the dual voice hypothesis. I also try to correlate the informants’ interpretations with formal features of the technique elicited by theoreticians. The outcome shows that dual voice, as well as single voice, is a prominent interpretative choice that readers make and so I conclude that linguistic theories of the style should reflect these spontaneous readerly intuitions. The responses also raise questions about the analysis of free indirect style as discourse, showing that discourse links interact with linguistic indicators of voice in complex ways, a fact that has to be accounted for in a discourse theory of free indirect style.