Free indirect speech lets novelists smuggle contestable claims into a seeming-objective voice.

Evidence

There is, of course, nothing untoward in Aslam’s declaring for art and literature over indoctrination: growing up the son of a Communist activist and eventually fleeing General Zia’s military dictatorship in Pakistan may well have sharpened his acuity in portraying the dead hand of religiously justified censorship. However, speaking on behalf of this illiterate Afghan boy does bring responsibilities with which Aslam is perhaps somewhat cavalier. He is not above omniscient intrusion when it seems necessary to emphasize the boy’s closed-mindedness. Similarly, there are significant quirks of tone, as when the culturally monomaniacal Casa unfeasibly relativizes his worldview by crediting the self-sacrificing passengers aboard United Flight 93 on 9/11 with the same motives as “martyrdom bombers” (250). There is also the insistent deployment of free indirect speech, punctuating the characters’ thoughts and dialogue with something more distanced and therefore seemingly objective; the stream of thought conveying Lara’s nighttime dash to try at last to discover the fate of her brother is punctuated by a much cooler “external voice” regaling us with the highly debatable assertion that “the religion of Islam at its core does not believe in the study of science” (133). This manipulation of the text’s polyphony contributes to a sense that Aslam is trying to “have it both ways”: to condemn the excesses of religious fundamentalism but also to claim the ability to penetrate the conflicted inner worlds of its adherents to find the embers of a common humanity after all. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 406

Categorization

• XREF: The device of ‘having it both ways’ through narrative polyphony is exactly what the reader must trace in Hamid and Naqvi — both use first-person narrators, which shifts how free indirect speech functions.
• DEFINE: Identifies free indirect speech as a distancing technique that lends a pseudo-objectivity to narrator-intruded claims — the key craft tool for reading contestation vs. reinforcement.
• QUESTION: Does first-person narration (Hamid, Naqvi) foreclose this particular ‘having it both ways’ move, or relocate it?