from the character’s. In indirect speech, the cues are removed, so the perspectives of author and character merge rather than remaining distinct. In the first case, the judgment that the character’s wife is unhappy is attributed clearly and exclusively to the character; in the second case, that judgment might have been made either by the character or by the author, or by both. The benefit of close third, on Wood’s view, is that readers see things through the character’s eyes and language and through those of the author. “We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once,” he says. Between author and character yawns a gap, and close third “simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to it,” which makes close third a form of dramatic irony, a way “to see through a character’s eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can see.”
The point of view in “The Lovers of the Poor,” though, seems to me to demonstrate a difference from close third as Wood describes it, a difference significant enough that the point of view in Brooks’s poem merits a new name: not “close third” but “critical third.” The advantage of close third, on Wood’s view, is that we “inhabit omniscience and partiality at once.” The advantage of critical third, I contend, is not that we inhabit at once partiality and omniscience but that we inhabit at once partiality and impartiality. If in close third the authorial perspective resembles that of God, in critical third the authorial perspective resembles that of an impartial spectator.
The impartial spectator is an imaginative construct introduced by Adam Smith, to explain how we come to regulate our passions and motives by ethical criteria rather than exclusively on the basis of perceived self-interest. Smith alleges that our sentiments “have always some secret reference either to what are, or to what upon a certain condition would be, or to what we imagine ought to be the sentiments of others. We examine [our conduct] as we imagine an impartial spectator would examine it.” Having entered into “all the passions and motives which influenced” that conduct, we either “approve of it by sympathy with the approbation of this supposed equitable judge” or else “we enter into his disapprobation and condemn it.” Smith considers the ability to imagine and enter into the perspective of the impartial spectator a necessary condition for moral self-awareness. His idea is simple: as long as I stay conceptually within my own subject position, only my self-interest participates in my judgment, so my decisions have prudential, but not ethical, character. Only by imaginatively occupying a hypothetical subject position, and judging as such a subject would judge, can I make ethical decisions. I become capable of equitable judgment only when I can see what an equitable judge would see, and as an equitable judge would see. Just as I can see myself only with the aid of a device such as a mirror or camera, so, according to Smith, I can think ethically only with the aid of a device, the impartial spectator.
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