View of Different Actors.=--This last instance leads
us to consider the possibility of telling different sections of the
story from the points of view of different characters, assigning to
each the particular phase of the narrative that he is especially
fitted to recount. Three quarters of the "Strange Case of Doctor
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is narrated in the third person, externally; but
the final intimate vividness of horror is gained by shifting to an
internal point of view for the two concluding chapters,--the first
written by Dr. Lanyon, and the last by Jekyll himself. Mr. Kipling
has developed to very subtle uses the expedient of opening a story
from the point of view of a narrator who is named simply "I" and who
is not characterized in any way at all, and then letting the story
proper be told to this impersonal narrator by several characters who
are clearly delineated through their speech and through the parts that
they have played in the tale that they are telling. This device is
used in nearly all the stories of the "Soldiers Three." The narrator
meets Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd under certain circumstances, and
gathers from them bit by bit the various features of the story,--one
detail being contributed by one of the actors, another by another,
until out of the successive fragments the story is built up. It is in
this way also, as we have already noted, that the tale of Mrs.
Bathurst is set before the reader.

=4. The Epistolary Point of View.=--A convenient means of shifting the
burden of the narrative at any point to a certain special character is
to introduce a letter written by that character to one of the other
people in the plot. This expedient is employed with extraordinary
cleverness by George Meredith in "Evan Harrington." Most of the tale
is told externally; but every now and then the clever and witty
Countess de Saldar writes a letter in which a leading incident is
illuminated from her personal point of view.

Ever since the days of Richardson the device has frequently been used
of telling an entire story through a series of letters exchanged among
the characters. The main advantage of this method is the constant
shifting of the point of view, which makes it possible for the reader
to see every important incident through the eyes of each of the
characters in turn. Furthermore, it is comparatively easy to
characterize in the first person when the thing that is written is so
intimate and personal