In Nabokov's short story "Beneficence" ("The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov", New York: Vintage 1997, p. 74-78), two kinds of point of view can be discovered: the predominant limited first-person point of view and, in several passages, also a second-person point of view employed always when the narrator refers to his lover and serving to point out their (former) close relationship. As the narrator is a person whose attitudes, feelings, emotions and recognitions influence the way the story is told, he is dramatised and, in the first part of the story (until p. 75, 5th paragraph), also a narrator-agent, while in the remaining part he has no influence on the action any more and is thus only an observer.

The narrator in "Beneficence" is not necessarily reliable, for some of his statements and recognitions are not completely true or too idealistic.

The conception of distance also plays an important role in...