The reader, then, may be said to watch a reflection
of the facts in a mirror of which the edge is nowhere in doubt; it is
rounded by the bounds of the narrator's own personal experience.
This limitation may have a convenience and a value in the story, it
may contribute to the effect. But it need not be forfeited, it is
clear, if the first person is changed to the third. The author may use
the man's field of vision and keep as faithfully within it as though
the man were speaking for himself. In that case he retains this
advantage and adds to it another, one that is likely to be very much
greater. For now, while the point of view is still fixed in space,
still assigned to the man in the book, it is free in _time_; there no
longer stretches, between the narrator and the events of which he
speaks, a certain tract of time, across which the past must appear in
a more or less distant perspective. All the variety obtainable by a
shifting relation to the story in time is thus in the author's hand;
the safe serenity of a far retrospect, the promising or threatening
urgency of the present, every gradation between the two, can be drawn
into the whole effect of the book, and all of it without any change
of the seeing eye. It is a liberty that may help the story
indefinitely, raising this matter into strong relief, throwing that
other back into vaguer shade.
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