Abstract

This paper examines how Lea Ypi’s Free (2021) constructs freedom, ideology, and identity through discourse and narrative voice. Drawing on discourse analysis, memory studies, and narrative theory, the study shows how the memoir exposes the ideological paradoxes of socialist and post-socialist Albania, highlights the role of memory and irony in reframing experience, and captures the emotional fragmentation of transition. Through double-voiced narration and shifting vocabularies of freedom, Free reveals liberty not as a fixed political condition but as a contested and continually reconstructed idea.