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The third-person omniscient narrator of “The Passing of Grandison” functions almost as another character: a storyteller. This storyteller doesn’t merely report events and convey what’s going on in the minds of characters. The narrator also comments, often wryly or with an ironic slant, on characters’ motivations, actions, and reactions. In fact, this wry tone introduces the story’s main motivation right away: “what a man will not do to please a woman,” a question the narrator says has never been answered satisfactorily.
The storytelling narrator does not shy away from taking sides. They slowly reveal the colonel’s rigid, self-important view of himself, his class, and the people he enslaves, and in the story’s final lines they condemn this view as “impotent.” The narrator also offers an opinion of Charity, albeit in a subtler, more implicit way. Initially, she seems somewhat sympathetic to the Ohio man whose support of abolition costs him his life. But upon Dick’s return, Charity reprimands him for taking the same risks “that Yankee” took and hence disavows her romanticized view of the Ohio man’s actions. In this way, the narrator reveals Charity’s hypocrisy.
The narrator is a bit more indulgent of Dick’s foibles, and in the end, they show that he’s smart enough to grasp that something more had been going on with Grandison during their travels north. The narrator reports Dick’s skepticism and comments that he “calmly smoked his cigar” during his father’s excited reaction to Grandison’s return. This moment suggests that Dick is catching on, though he still doesn’t consider how the situation affects his own pampered life.
Only Grandison has the narrator’s true admiration. Indeed, the narrator never once slips in a wry or judgmental comment about Grandison. Though Dick may the story’s protagonist, in the eyes of the narrator, Grandison is its hero.
