I'm revising the novel so I can submit it for my degree, at last.
Here's what I just figured out: The perspective shifted all over the place in the early drafts. I followed these shifts, correcting them where I could, and wondering how in the world I had managed to become such a crummy writer. Now I understand what was happening: In a third-person narrative, slight, subtle, almost unnoticeable shifts in perspective actually happen all the time. And that's okay. More than okay. It's how you show, rather than tell, that the characters are changing.
We do this all the time in real life, and our ordinary language captures it: And then I saw things a different way. My perspective shifted. I changed my mind.
