Question

Read the following passage carefully before choosing your answer:

Teresa held the dried fern specimen up to the oil lamp, the delicate fronds throwing a web of skeletal shadows across her notes. For months, the letters from the expedition had arrived with dry, administrative lists of coordinates and cargo counts, never once mentioning the damp heat of the river basin or the indigo birds that she knew must have nested in the canopy. Her father’s handwriting in the margins was neat and unyielding, a record of species cataloged and crates shipped, as if the forest were merely a ledger to be balanced. She leaned closer, her breath briefly fogging the glass of the lamp. Did he truly believe that by drying these leaves, by pinning them to heavy rag paper and writing their Latin names in black ink, they had captured the essence of the place? A draft rattled the glass panes of the conservatory, and she pulled her woolen shawl tighter around her shoulders. In the morning, the next vessel would depart, carrying her replies—more lists, more coordinates, more requests for dried roots. She lowered the specimen and dipped her pen, the scratching sound of the steel nib on the paper sounding like a small, trapped insect.

In the passage, the narrator’s manipulation of narrative distance primarily serves to do which of the following?