Read the following passage carefully before choosing your answer.
The ledger was bound in cracked calfskin that left a fine, yellow dust on Eleanor’s fingertips whenever she turned a page. In the quiet of the registry office, the rhythmic scraping of her pen was the only sound, save for the occasional rattle of coal settling in the grate. For three years, she had recorded the arrival of cargo ships she would never see, translating the crude timber and raw wool of distant ports into neat columns of black ink. To Eleanor, these entries were not merely transactions; they were coordinates of a world that existed only in the margins of her ledger. When she wrote 'The Sea Venture, from Canton, with silks,' she did not picture the sails or the spray, but rather the silent, orderly shelves where the bolts of fabric would eventually reside. Her uncle often chided her for this lack of imagination, insisting that a clerk should feel the pulse of commerce. Yet, looking out the narrow window at the grey drizzle that perpetually shrouded the docks, Eleanor found comfort in the ledger's absolute stillness. Outside, the harbor was a chaotic muddle of shouting men and shifting tides, but within the ruled lines of her pages, every ship arrived exactly on time, and every cargo was perfectly balanced.
In the passage, the third-person limited point of view functions primarily to do which of the following?
- Aestablish a first-person narrative voice that allows Eleanor to directly address the reader about her feelings of isolation
- Bconvey the author’s personal critique of the mundane and repetitive nature of nineteenth-century clerical work
- reveal Eleanor’s psychological preference for order and control by contrasting her internal perception of the ledger with the external chaos of the harborAnswer
- Dsuggest that the narrator is unreliable because Eleanor admits she has never actually seen the cargo ships she records
- Eprovide a chronological log of Eleanor’s daily tasks and interactions with her uncle in the registry office