The Landlady

Indirect free speech is a literary device wherein a character’s thoughts are accessed through third-person narration. In “The Landlady,” this character is Billy; we are privy to his reactions, thoughts, and feelings, but not to the landlady’s. Through his documented thoughts, we understand Billy to be a conventional, somewhat limited character. He tends to judge things quickly, and seems superficial and easily bored. The tone of his narration is breezy and flip, a tone that is in disturbing and ironical contrast to the gathering sinister mood of the story. He is constantly observing small things about the landlady’s person and demeanor that serve to alarm the reader, but that he himself blandly dismisses: “Now and again he caught a whiff of a peculiar smell that seemed to emanate directly from her person […] Pickled walnuts? New leather? Or was it the corridors of a hospital?” (Lines 393 - 97). Here, Billy fails to put together that this “peculiar smell” is likely the embalming agents the landlady has used on her former pets, and former boarders.