4.B Third-Person Limited (NAR-1.G, NAR-1.H)

Third-person limited is first person wearing a different coat. Swap the pronoun from I to she and you have not changed what the narrator can know, only how the narrator sounds while knowing it. The vantage stays sealed to one mind. Everything that happens inside that character's head is open to the narrator: fears, half-formed plans, the private gloss on what someone else just said. Everyone else in the scene is visible only from outside, the way a stranger would see them: their words, their faces, their actions, never their thoughts.

This is why a single slip is so easy to spot and so damaging. The moment a sentence reports what a second character is thinking or feeling from inside, the anchor has moved and the narration is no longer limited to the first character. That break is not a style choice; it is a different mode, since limited narration depends on exactly one mind being transparent and all others being opaque.

This connects to what a novel does with its anchor across a whole book. Some novels keep the camera on one person for every page, so the reader learns the world exactly as that person learns it, gaining intimacy but losing any view that character cannot have. Others move the anchor chapter by chapter, entering a different mind each time. That gains breadth: several angles on the same stretch of time. It costs a stable home, because each new chapter starts the sealing over again, and no character inside the book ever knows what the accumulated reader now knows.