Free Indirect Style Representing ‘thought’ in L’Assommoir and Its Translation : Diachronic Comparison with the Translation of ‘speech’

Free indirect style, also known as free indirect discourse, is one of the most effective stylistic tools in L’Assommoir, a French naturalist novel written by Émile Zola. The author used this stylistic tool in order to have his readers listen attentively to characters’ speech or thought in the literary text. Free indirect style is one of the methods by which the narrator reports characters’ speech or thought such as direct or indirect discourse, but its form doesn’t use that of direct or indirect discourse and it uses rather the form of narration. This ambiguous feature of free indirect style makes the readers discover a polyphonic discordance, that is, a vocal mixture of character(s) and narrator in a sentence.BR In a previous study related to the translation of free indirect style representing characters’ speech in this novel, I have found diachronic aspects of translating French free indirect style into Korean. I analyzed the translation of free indirect style representing characters’ thought in this study and then compared different aspects between the translations of ‘expressed’ speech and ‘unexpressed’ thought.