Framed as a critique of Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism and focusing on classic novels by Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, and Zora Neale Hurston, this article provides a genealogical analysis of and argument for the significance of free indirect style for the development of intersubjectivity in the modern era. Furthermore, it offers close third as a better term for the technique, which is more about facilitating imagined intimacy than effecting the kinds of freedom Bewes and Kornbluh focus on. Close third, I argue, opens up a spectrum of sympathetic identification and ironic disdain within which we situate ourselves as readers of prose narrative.
Loren Glass (2026) studied this question.