‘A Changed Man’の語り手と物語の技巧

‘A Changed Man’ (1913) by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is an interesting short story in terms of narrative techniques. A supposed omniscient narrator who illogically avoids the responsibility of telling the whole truth throughout the story by asserting that ‘the man in the oriel’ solely gives all the facts tells this story. As a handy-capped man who cannot go out without a wheelchair, this man gets familiarized with the episodes prevalent in the small town in a very limited way through the talk with his friends. Through the eyes of ‘the man in the oriel’ as a point-of-view person, we readers ‘see’ the places whereon the drama between Laura and Captain Maumbry is played. With the fragmented information given by the omniscient narrator along with ‘the man in the oriel’ who naturally enough acquires the information about Laura and Captain Maumbry from his friends, we are supposed to get together the fragments of information and reconstruct the whole aspect of the drama. This unique method seems to approach in a sense the modernity method in the twentieth century fiction.
Along with this uniqueness of narrative, the sensationalistic climax in the story leads us readers to the ambivalence of ‘changed’ in the title ‘A Changed Man’; that is, ‘a changed man’ could be ‘a man who has changed,’ or ‘a man who has been changed,’ or even ‘a man who has changed others.’ This ambiguity seems to deepen and widen the construing of this story.
These techniques may be anticipating some aspect of the modernity novel in the 20th century. In this paper some aspects of modernity in ‘A Changed Man’ are discussed in relation with the narrative techniques.