On the other hand, the advantage of following the
stir of Harry's imagination _while_ it is stirring would be great;
the effect would be straighter, the impression deeper, the reader
would have been nearer to Harry throughout, and more closely
implicated in his affair. Think of the young man, for instance, in
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment--there is a young man whose
experience surrounds and presses upon the reader, is felt and tasted
and endured by the reader; and any one who has been through the book
has truly become Raskolnikov, and knows exactly what it was to be that
young man. Drama is there pushed into the theatre of a mind; the play
proceeds with the reading of the book, accompanying the eye that falls
on it. How could a retrospect in the words of the young man--only of
course Dostoevsky had no choice in the matter, such a method was ruled
out--but supposing the story had admitted it, how could a retrospect
have given Raskolnikov thus bodily into the reader's possession? There
could have been no conviction in his own account comparable with the
certainty which Dostoevsky has left to us, and left because he neither
spoke for himself (as the communicative author) nor allowed
Raskolnikov to speak, but uncovered the man's mind and made us look.
It seems, then, to be a principle of the story-teller's art that a
personal narrator will do very well and may be extremely helpful, so
long as the story is only the reflection of life beyond and outside
him; but that as soon as the story begins to find its centre of
gravity in his own life, as soon as the main weight of attention is
claimed for the speaker rather than for the scene, then his report of
himself becomes a matter which might be strengthened, and which should
accordingly give way to the stronger method.
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