But the air! If you stopped to notice, was the air always like this?
This is one of a handful of examples of "free indirect discourse" or "free indirect style": the impersonal, third-person narrator conveys Laura's thoughts without markers such as "Laura thought" or "Laura said." This narrative mode enables the text to seamlessly move in and out of characters' subjectivities. Would it be possible to write a program to identify instances of free indirect discourse?
free indirect speech translates the internal contradictions of Austen’s characters to her readers.36 Charlotte is granted by Austen that formal device which critics have long agreed mediates the complexity of her characters at other moments—when her motives shift from relieving Elizabeth of Mr. Collins’s irksome companionship to thinking about the benefits of securing him as her own husband, for example—but here, when Charlotte wants to make clear to her friend that she has not chosen an unhappy life, she is articu-lately straightforward. Charlotte’s mode of communication only adds to Elizabeth’s discomfort about her friend’s attitude toward intimacy.
More mention of narrative and strong example of Austin's FID. Charlotte's language changes when her subject manner changes. Does Austen choose to make Charlotte a complex, or flat character? I find it amazing that Austen's language (which, as a reader, is easy to overlook) provides so much detail and depth to her characters and their situations.