Voice

[[deleted user]]

This is the most impressive example of an authentic voice for the story not written in the first person. It is easy for Twain to forge a sense of place and people with first-person narration in a dialect. Hamsum does it in the reserved detachment of the omniscient narrator, which is in itself nicely Lutheran. Even though no character is narrating, the language and tone, especially the tone, color the story the way the folk about whom the story was written would see it if they could see it all. Brilliant. Homesteading the sub-Arctic never sounded so pleasant.