Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a little contempt for them. 
(166) 
Indeed, if we examine the given extract, it is obvious that free indirect style differs enormously 
in effect from the often unsettling, seemingly disjointed picture of characters’ mind. In the present 
passage, the verbs in the past tense, namely “pitied”, “brushed” and “had”, clearly provide 
evidence that the passage is indirectly seen through the narrator’s eyes. It seems certainly that 

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characters’ feelings are a great deal more important than the very characters, as the emotions 
described are typical for all human beings, especially if we treat people from the aesthetic modernist 
perspective. Generally, indirect thought that is also often used in modernist literature tends to 
employ pronouns he or she instead of one. As Regina Rudaitytė suggests, in modernist fiction, 
“characters are abolished in favour of pronouns in the text: they, he, she. These unidentified 
pronouns point to undifferentiated beings, and what is crucial is the removal of even the remotest 
possibility of identification, instead, the reader is invited to supply his own version, to participate in 
this perpetual creation unfolding right before his eyes, simultaneously with the process of reading”. 
(2000:13) To illustrate this, let us now have a look at one more example of indirect thought from 
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1996) which illustrates Lily’s thoughts:
(8) She had always found him difficult. She had never been able to praise him to his 
face, she remembered. (162) 
As can be seen in the given extract, despite the fact that Lily thinks about herself, she tends to 
characterize the doer of the actions in an indirect way, by means of the pronoun she, as if creating 
the invisible participant in the situation. It seems that the character wants to evaluate the situation 
objectively, from the neutral narrator’s point of view. At the same time, however, the reader 
perceives the emotional colouring of the sentences, which discloses the character’s inner state and 
feelings. In Lee’s words, the difference between direct and indirect thought appears when we 
presume original words Lily may have actually thought. It may be just an assumption, but the shift 
is possible in the way of transferring the indirect form to the direct. 
Obviously, it could be stated that in To the Lighthouse, among the characters, Lily Briscoe is 
described most frequently with the help of Free Indirect Discourse. Lee says that Mrs. Ramsay’ 
thoughts are also mainly characterized by means of this technique. Why does Woolf choose this 
technique of disclosing the characters’ thoughts? In my opinion, this innovative way of portraying 
characters’ mind and inner world can be treated as evidence that these two women are the most 
important characters in this novel, and this is the reason why their consciousness description seems 
to occupy most of the parts where they appear in the novel. Indeed, as Lee (1977) believes, the high 
frequency of pronouns he, she, and one seems to be something particular in the majority of Woolf’s 
novels. In her use of FID, Woolf usually purposefully violates the traditionally accepted use of 
grammatical tenses. In fact, the choice of personal pronoun depends on the narrative form. For 
example, the third person narrative employs personal pronouns such as he or she, and the first 
person narrative employs personal pronouns such as I. To illustrate this, consider the following 
brief description of Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts from To the Lighthouse (2006): 

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(9) She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like