musing on "Pride and Prejudice": the big narrative choice

There are two levels / layers for the production (production, not reception) of a work of art such a book:
the story told (or content, if you will),
and the author's delivery (or medium, if you want).

In "Pride and Prejudice" -"Emma" is another good example- Austen sets out to expose her main character's misguided propensity to pass judgement on others: Elisabeth will be found to have been wrong after being explained the reasons behind Mr. Darcy's behaviour. Now how Austen tells this story is the point: there is parallel deception at work here.

Elisabeth can only react to what she gets told by the other characters; we can only react to what we get told by the author. ...We are both taken in as the author plays the same trick on both of us.

Austen achieves her end by feeding her heroine and her readers incomplete information. By hiding crucial information that exonerates Darcy and reveals Elisabeth's error, the author mischievously / dishonestly (you decide) omnipotently leads both her protagonist and audience onto the wrong path. She misleads her and us on both levels (plot and narration).

Harsh, some might say ...but isn't it what life is like? Do we ever have complete, impartial knowledge of what is going on? Do we ever actually know anybody else in the world (let alone ourselves)? Are we ever in possession of all the facts?
And yet -yet- we continually decide on a course of action; we continually pass judgement on others. Because we have to.

So what Austen does here is illustrate this existential struggle. Elisabeth (or Emma) means well ...but ultimately she's wrong. She will be found to have been deluded by the narrative tricks of deus ex machina, dramatic twists, confessions, conflicting points of view and so on.
All that the well meaning deluded protagonist did was strive for the best (given the information she was fed and impressions she was consequently able to form).


Concept of suspense and dramatic irony.

Hitchcock talked about the two differing approaches to story-telling (and their attendant effects): you could have a birthday cake suddenly exploding in the middle of a restaurant (shock effect: 1 second) or you could show a terrorist planting a bomb in a birthday cake, wheeling it into the room, watching as the revellers tuck into their mean unaware of the tragedy about to happy (tension length: as long as you want to make it last).

Austen could choose to show us from the start how misguided Elisabeth is, and this would make for a totally different novel. It's a tactical choice alright.
There are dozens of filums out there that deliberately choose to privilege the second option and / or play around with the consequences of narrative revelations: the Japanese "Chaos", the South Korean "Two Sisters", the French "he loves me, he loves me not", and "Irreversible", "Memento"...