The novel's third-person omniscient narrator recounts the story and comments on the characters with a tone that is at once playful and serious. The tone is mocking without being derisive and somber without being melodramatic. This balance is in part a result of the narrator's perspective, which combines an intimate look at the characters' fraught inner worlds and a zoomed-out look at the objectively silly situations the characters put themselves in. The tone consequently inspires the reader to feel sympathy for all of the characters, even creating a certain amount of empathy in readers for the least sympathetic figures in the novel.
Quite frequently, the narrator offers commentary that significantly shapes the reader's understanding of what's going on. While the narrator remains removed from the plot at all times, there are moments in which the narrator seems delighted or touched by the story's events and characters. By poking at least a little fun at everyone, Forster and the narrator show—by way of the novel's tone—that everyone can and deserves to be understood; or, at the very least, the novel tacitly suggests that none of its characters should automatically be overlooked or discounted because of their various faults or flaws.
