hat he sat at the back of the classroom through the school year, and that he had a few out of school interviews with Christine Zajac and some of her family members. He gives us a word tour of Holyoke as she sees it (pp. 57 63), presumably the result of a ride along tour. Near the end of the book (pp. 320 23), as part of what amounts to a retrospective summing up, he introduces us to Miss Harty, a teacher who Chris Zajac remembers as having had a major impact on her when she was in elementary school. (Ironically, though Kidder presumably visited Miss Harty, Chris Zajac has not, though she "kept meaning to" (p. 323). Throughout the book, Kidder keeps very strictly to his invisible narrator role. He never does give us his own impressions directly.
This is a significant shortcoming, because we necessarily see everything through Kidder's eyes, yet we never really get to know him. By the nature of his methodology, we are required to depend on his subjective impressions of both events and their meaning, but we do not know enough about him to know how to inte
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