Pendennis, the hero of a former novel. Stevenson
assigns to Mackellar the task of narrating "The Master of Ballantrae":
but when the Master disappears and Mackellar remains at home with Mr.
Henry, it is necessary for the author to invent a second personage,
the Chevalier de Burke, to tell the story of the Master's wanderings.

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 Dr. 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.

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 Mr. 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 vi