Writing Technique - Thoughts on "Free Indirect Speech"

In his book, How Fiction Works (1), James Woods gives a name to a technique I’ve been aware of, but never seen discussed.  He calls it “free indirect speech,” used to show what a character is thinking.  He demonstrates it this way:

“He looked over at his wife.  She looked so unhappy,” he thought, “almost sick.”  He wondered what to say.

That is direct, quoted speech.The most common technique, he says, is the “indirect speech:”

He looked over at his wife.  She looked so unhappy, he thought.  Almost sick.  He wondered what to say.

“Free” indirect speech he demonstrates with this version:

He looked over at his wife.  Yes, she was tiresomely unhappy again, almost sick.  What the hell should he  say?

On page 14 of the book Woods does a wonderful analysis of a passage from Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, which shows James using the “free indirect style” to show Maisie’s understanding of the adult world around her.  Woods points out all the different voices in Maisie’s head: the things she believes adults have said, as she understands it. 

Woods points out the opportunities the free indirect style offers for irony, when the author and the reader know more than the character does. I find a wonderful example in Hilary Mantel’s Fludd.  In this paragraph the author tells us what the architect was thinking when he designed a supposedly “medieval” church.

The Church was in fact less than a hundred years old; it had been built when the Irish came to Fetherhoughton to work in the three cotton mills.  But someone had briefed its architect to make it look as if it had always stood there.  In those poor, troubled days it was an understandable wish, and the architect had a sense of history; it was a Shakespearean sense of history, with a grant contempt of the pitfalls of anachronism.  Last Wednesday and the Battle of Bosworth are all  one; the past is the past, and Mrs. O’Toole, buried last Wednesday, is neck and neck with King Richard in the hurtle to eternity…⁠ (2)

As I find more and more examples I remember something from discourse analysis/text linguistics, which study how text coheres, what holds a paragraph together and defines it as a paragraph.One example is the following:

Tom and Sam decided to go to a movie so Tom and Sam went down town and Tom and Sam bought tickets and then Tom and Sam went into the  theater.

Sounds like you keep starting over and over, so the text linguists point out that the use of a pronoun subordinates the rest of the paragraph to the sentence with the proper names, and so gives the paragraph structure and coherence:

Tom and Sam decided to go to a movie so they went down town and they bought tickets and then they went into the  theater.

Which still has too many pronouns, but it isn’t so distracting as the repeated proper names in the first version.  It does sound like a complete paragraph.

If we take out all the pronouns it begins to sound like “free indirect speech.”  

Tom and Sam decided to go to a movie, so went down town and bought tickets and then went into the theater.

I’m interested in how leaving out the pronouns binds the paragraph more tightly.  It changes the density of the prose.

He looked over at his wife.  She looked so unhappy, he thought.  Almost sick.  He wondered what to say.

When we take out the “he thoughts” we also subordinate that sentence within the paragraph, just as the pronouns serve to subordinate the sentences in the paragraph about Tom and Same.  And it gives that “chunk” of prose a tighter, more cohesive structure.  And it happens when we leave out the repeated pronoun subject:

He looked over at his wife.  Yes, she was tiresomely unhappy again, most sick.   What the hell should he say?

This prose is efficient, as well as vigorous. - SQ

1) Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
2) Henry Holt and Company, 1989, p.16.