SOURCE: "The Uses of Authorial Silence," in The Rhetoric of Fiction, The University of Chicago Press, 1961, pp. 271-309.

In the following excerpt, Booth discusses the importance of Winterbourne as narrator.

The events in James's early success, Daisy Miller (1879), might seem to be naturally suited to tragic or strongly pathetic effects. An innocent young American girl tours Europe, behaving in the open, casual, uncircumspect way that comes naturally to her. Her free ways with men are misinterpreted by the sophisticated, Europeanized Americans she meets. She is gradually ostracized, forced more and more into the company of Europeans. Finally she is driven to an act of extreme rashness, which leads to her death. Only then do her observers recognize their mistake about her. Tragedy would be relatively easy to come by in telling this tale. But as James tells us in his Preface, he did not want tragedy. Though Daisy's...