Intimate third
In class yesterday we discussed Tobias Wolff's The Barracks Thief and his use of a limited and intimate 3rd-person narrator.I asked everyone to look at one paragraph in particular. It comes in chapter 5, after the character of Lewis has stolen $2 from a corporal in his barracks:
"Later, when he hears that the corporal is telling everyone he had a hundred dollars stolen, Lewis gets even madder. That evening at dinner he stares at the corporal openly but the corporal eats without looking up. On his way out of the mess hall Lewis deliberately bumps against the corporal's chair, hard. He stops at the door and looks back. The man is eating ice cream like nothing happened. It burns Lewis up."
In the paragraph, the point of view transforms from what seems like a standard limited 3rd-person narrator to one that that uses the language of the character himself, telling us that something "burned Lewis up." There's this tremendous intimacy that gets established in the final sentence because of the word choice.
A 3rd-person narrator isn't just a narrator who sits someplace above the world of the story, watching. Sometimes a 3rd-person narrator is right there at the shoulder of a character, watching as the he or she goes to a movie, makes love, dreams — or gets angry and bumps someone's chair.
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