There is a final refinement of free indirect style--we should now just call it authorial irony--when the gap between an author's voice and a character's voice seems to collapse altogether; when a character's voice does indeed seem rebelliously to have taken over the narration altogether. 'The town was small, worse than a village, and in it lived almost none but old people, who died so rarely it was even annoying.' What an amazing opening! It is the first sentence of Chekhov's story 'Rothschild's Fiddle.' The next sentences are: 'And in the hospital and jail there was very little demand for coffins. In short, business was bad.' The rest of the paragraph introduces us to an extremely mean coffin-maker, and we realise that the story has opened in the middle of free indirect style: [...] We are in the midst of the coffinmaker's mind, for whom longevity is an economic nuisance. Chekhov subverts the expected neutrality of the opening of a story or novel, which might traditionally begin with a panning shot before we narrow our focus [...]