What narrative perspective shapes the reader's understanding of the fall and its aftermath?

• A. Gene's retrospective first-person memory.
• B. Finny's diary entries.
• C. An omniscient narrator.
• D. Multiple viewpoints without bias.

Answer: (A)

The reader’s understanding is shaped by Gene’s retrospective first-person memory. The story is told from Gene Forrester looking back on his time at Devon, with years of reflection coloring how he recalls the fall and its aftermath. That distance and his accompanying guilt, evasions, and shifting interpretations shape what we learn and how we interpret Finny’s accident, making the narrative itself a filter through which truth—and memory—are examined. Since the narrator isn’t omniscient and is clearly biased by emotion and memory, the reader is invited to question what really happened and why Gene remembers it this way. Finny’s diary entries don’t appear in the text, the narration isn’t from an all-knowing observer, and the story isn’t presented as a neutral, multi-voiced account, all of which reinforces why this perspective best fits the material.