Free indirect speech is a style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech; it is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in French, discours indirect libre.

Free indirect speech has been described as a "technique of presenting a character's voice partly mediated by the voice of the author" (or, reversing the emphasis, "that the character speaks through the voice of the narrator") with the voices effectively merged. It has also been described as "the illusion by which third-person narrative comes to express...the intimate subjectivity of fictional characters." The word "free" in the phrase is used to capture the fact that with this technique, the author can "roam from viewpoint to viewpoint" instead of being fixed with one character or with the narrator.

According to British philologist Roy Pascal, Goethe and Jane Austen were the first novelists to use this style consistently and 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert was the first to be aware of it as a style.