Is free indirect discourse possible in first person narration? Remarks on Proust’s A la
recherche du temps perdu
Mervi Helkkula
There has been controversy about the possibility of FID in first person narration. Linguists who
consider that FID is a category based on a set of formal criteria normally think that third person is
one of its essential grammatical marks. If FID is instead regarded more as a strategy making it
possible for the speaker to move from one plane of enunciation to another, there is no reason why
there couldn’t be FID in first person. A narrator telling about his own past life can anchor his story
on varying temporal planes, which means that he can tell the story either as seen through the eyes of
his former, younger self, or from his actual point of view. Examples from Marcel Proust’s
“autobiographical” novel show that FID is one of the means of keeping separate the different
perspectives, that of the narrating self and that of the acting or the remembering self. The line
between different types of thought representation is not always clear-cut, and very often it is not
evident where the FID begins and where it ends. Proust’s novel presents in fact a scale of mixed
forms of thought representation, going from a slightly “contaminated “ narrative discourse to free
direct discourse.