There is nothing more disconcerting in a novel than to _see_ the
writer changing his part in this way--throwing off the character into
which he has been projecting himself and taking a new stand outside
and away from the story.
Perhaps it is only Thackeray, among the great, who seems to find a
positively wilful pleasure in damaging his own story by open
maltreatment of this kind; there are times when Thackeray will even
boast of his own independence, insisting in so many words on his
freedom to say what he pleases about his men and women and to make
them behave as he will. But without using Thackeray's licence a
novelist may still do his story an ill turn by leaving too naked a
contrast between the subjective picture of what passes through Emma's
mind--Emma's or Becky's, as it may be--and the objective rendering of
what he sees for himself, between the experience that is mirrored in
another thought and that which is shaped in his own. When one has
lived _into_ the experience of somebody in the story and received the
full sense of it, to be wrenched out of the story and stationed at a
distance is a shock that needs to be softened and muffled in some
fashion. Otherwise it may weaken whatever was true and valid in the
experience; for here is a new view of it, external and detached, and
another mind at work, the author's--and that sense of having shared
the life of the person in the story seems suddenly unreal.
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