Question

Read the following passage carefully before choosing your answer:

It was, of course, entirely Julian's decision to sell the orchard, or so he took pains to assure us over those long, damp afternoons in the conservatory. He spoke of 'rationalizing resources' and 'the inevitable march of the municipality,' terms he had undoubtedly harvested from the brochures left by the railway surveyors. To hear him tell it, the transaction was a triumph of modern husbandry, a clearing away of dead wood to make room for the vital pulse of the town. Yet, as I watched his hands—which were never quite still, always tracing the grain of the wicker table as if searching for a split—I was struck by the exhausting theater of his confidence. He did not look at the windows, behind which the old pear trees stood in their stubborn, unpruned gravity, but kept his eyes fixed on the blueprints spread between us. He wanted us to believe that he was the architect of his own capitulation. We were to admire the clean lines of the draftsmanship, to overlook the fact that the ink was barely dry and his signature trembled at the margin. In his voice, there was no room for regret, only the flat, metallic ring of progress, a sound that seemed to coat the dusty ferns of the room in a thin layer of ash.

Which of the following best describes the primary function of the narrator’s perspective in the passage?