Question

Read the following passage carefully:

Mr. Thorne adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles and dipped his fine-tipped nib into the iron gall ink. Before him lay the grand map of the parish, a vast, yellowed expanse of vellum that had, over forty years, become the sole repository of his attention. To the parish council, the map was a static document, a practical guide to property lines and tax boundaries. But to Thorne, the ink lines were alive, pulsing with the silent histories of families long gone and roads reclaimed by pasture. He began to trace the contour of the Blackwood estate, carefully cross-hatching the borders with a precision that bordered on the religious. He convinced himself that by reinforcing these lines, he was preserving the order of the valley itself, keeping the chaotic sprawl of the neighboring industrial town from encroaching upon the ancient peace of his village. The scratch of his pen was the only sound in the damp office, a steady, comforting rhythm that shut out the distant, mechanical thrum of the new weaving mills. He did not look at the window, where the sky hung heavy with coal smoke, nor did he acknowledge the stack of unread notices from the railway company piled on the corner of his desk. In the quiet sanctuary of the archive, the lines behaved; they stayed where they were drawn, obedient to his hand, yielding a sense of absolute control that the changing world outside resolutely denied him.

In the passage, the third-person limited narrative point of view primarily functions to do which of the following?