A novelist's omniscience soon enough becomes a kind of secret sharing; this is called free indirect style, a term novelists have lots of different nicknames for--'close third person', or 'going into character'.

Might 'stupid' reflect a slight asperity or distance on the part of the author? Or does the word belong wholly to the character, with the author, in a rush of sympathy, having 'handed' it, as it were, to the tearful fellow?

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 [...]

His stories, through written technically in authorial third person, seem to emanate from a community of Sicilian peasants; they are thick with proverbial sayings, truisms, and homely similes.

Updike must work to establish the quiddity of his character

So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world—the language that fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging. [...]

the third horse of this troika