When students write about how A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is told, they often run into a wall. The narration is not first person, yet it sticks so close to Stephen's mind that it feels like it is. That blend of narrator and character is usually called free indirect discourse, and it is tough to describe.

Students tend to react in one of two ways. Some ignore the narration altogether and write about plot, while others use the term without showing they understand it. Neither approach produces the kind of analysis you are hoping for.

The good news is that feedback can teach this skill. A few targeted questions, asked in the margin, can help a student see that the narration is doing something worth writing about.

The approaches below work for both high school and college classes.

Ask whose words these are

The simplest question you can pose is whose voice a sentence belongs to. If a passage uses vocabulary that a young child would use, or that a proud teenager would use, the narration is bending toward Stephen. Students who learn to ask this question start to notice the effect on their own.

• Ask whether a sentence sounds like the narrator or like Stephen's own thinking
• Compare the early baby-talk sections to the language of the final chapter
• Point out where the narration shifts when Stephen's mood changes
• Ask what the reader gains from seeing thoughts without a clear frame
• Connect narration to theme, such as isolation or growing independence

Push past terminology

Naming the technique is a start, but it is not the goal. An essay that says "Joyce uses free indirect discourse" and then moves on has earned a vocabulary point at best. The analysis begins when the student explains what the technique does in a specific passage.

A comment like, "Show me a sentence where you can hear Stephen's voice inside the narration, and tell me what that closeness does," is practical and specific. It gives the student something to look for and something to write.

Reward students who notice the shift

One of the most impressive things a student can do is track how the style matures as Stephen does. The opening is simple and sensory, and the later chapters grow more abstract and intellectual. An essay that shows this development is doing sophisticated work, even if the prose is a little rough.

Build that into your rubric explicitly. If "analyzes how narration changes across the novel" is a criterion, students will know to look for it, and you will know how to score it.

Save your energy for the hard comments

Point-of-view feedback is more demanding than comma-splice feedback, and it deserves your best attention. Tools like GraideMind can take care of the surface layer, such as structure and citation issues, based on your rubric, so that you can concentrate on the conceptual notes.

That division of labor makes a real difference over a large stack. The student who is close to a breakthrough gets the thoughtful comment they need, and it does not get squeezed out by routine fixes.