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In:Practising Stylistics: Essays in Honour of Paul Simpson
Edited by Clara Neary, Simon Statham and Peter Stockwell
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 45] 2026
► pp. 226–242

Chapter 18
Narrative viewpoint, Free Indirect Discourse and irony in a ‘garden-path’ chapter of All Names Have Been Changed

 | Queen’s University Belfast
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Abstract
Bringing together several of Simpson’s stylistic commitments, in this chapter Jane Lugea focuses on narrative viewpoint and discourse presentation by analysing a chapter from the Clare Kilroy novel All Names Have Been Changed (2009). Emulating the type of pedagogical stylistics exercise pioneered by Simpson, Lugea sets out a classroom exercise that engages students to use discourse presentation strategies to identify homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration and connects the ultimate unexpected twist at the end of the story, obscured throughout the narrative by the operation of Free Indirect Discourse, to another of Simpson’s chief focuses, the definition of irony. Lugea also considers the wider implications of her analysis for the pedagogy of stylistics, for literary interpretations of this extract in the context of the Irish campus novel, and for our disciplinary understanding of the status and effects of Free Indirect Discourse.
Article outline
  • Narrative viewpoint and the art of misdirection
  • Narrative viewpoint, discourse presentation and irony
    • Narrative viewpoint
    • Discourse presentation
    • Free Indirect Discourse and irony
  • Analysis
    • Who is the narrator i.e. ‘who speaks?’
    • Evidence for a heterodiegetic reading
    • Evidence for a homodiegetic reading
  • Implications and conclusions
  • References
References (33)
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