Free indirect discourse can lock a novel into one character’s worldview

Evidence

It also attempts to make connections between domestic familial relations and an invasive, brutal outside world that threatens them. The novel marries a modernist structure reminiscent of Woolf and Joyce, where all events take place in one day and include moments of epiphany for the central character, with a more conventional deployment of omniscience and free indirect discourse. In fact, the proximity of omniscience and the protagonist’s modes of thought is one cause of the strong sense of a closed, self-justifying perspective running through the novel. Although Perowne is clearly in some ways a flawed character, we are never given an alternative to the complacent view he offers. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 104

Categorization

• XREF: This is a transferable close-reading tool: the merger of omniscience with the protagonist’s thought is exactly the mechanism to test in Hamid and Naqvi for whether they contest or reinforce Islamophobic perspectives. — connects to: Free indirect discourse is the literary form most faithful to bad faith. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 547; A writer’s formal method determines which social realities remain inaccessible to him — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 784; A writer’s book is best read through composition context and intended readership — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 511 (+2 more)
• SEED: Potential essay angle: using this ‘closed, self-justifying perspective’ diagnostic to distinguish novels that contest Islamophobia from those that unwittingly reproduce it through narrative form.