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Being the author!
Our answer to part 1:
Why the story feels 'neutral', and not tied to the viewpoint of one
character
(a) All of the participants in the story are referred to in the 3rd-person
mode. In other words, the pronouns referring back to the noun phrases
describing the characters are 3rd-person pronouns. The woman is referred
to with 'she' in S2 and the man is referred to with 'he' in S3. The cat
does not receive pronominal reference in the text, but if it had, it would
have to be referred to by 'it', 'he' or 'she' (as in this sentence).
(b) The story is also told in the present tense, to remove the idea of
a time perspective related to a telling of the story by one of the characters.
(c) What is described is not 'anchored' spatially or temporally to the
perceptions of just one of the characters in the story. For example the
content of S2 is accessible to the woman (and the reader, of course) but
not the man, and the content of most of sentence 2 (up to the verb 'enters')
is accessible to the man but not the woman.
(d) There are no indications of the emotional or ideological viewpoints
of either of the characters. For example, evaluative adjectives (e.g.
'horrible') and adverbs (e.g. threateningly') are absent from the description.
(e) There are no expressions which anchor the spatial or temporal viewpoint
to just one of the characters (note, for example how 'enters 'is neutral
compared with 'came into', which would anchor the description to a viewpoint
inside the room (consistent with the woman's perspective) or 'went into'
which would anchor it to a position outside the room (consistent with
the man's perspective).
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