So you have this sort of guide. But that guide can’t have a personality; it can only have a sound and you have to feel comfortable with this voice, and then this voice can easily abandon itself and reveal the interior dialogue of a character. So it’s a combination of using the point of view of various characters but still retaining the power to slide in and out, provided that when I’m “out” the reader doesn’t see little fingers pointing to what’s in the text. (78)
Morrison’s articulation of a guide is significant. The guide can take on multiple points of view, move the narrative, and does not (in an overt way) reveal itself or its itinerary. This aspect of the guide function is important to the narrative construction of We must consider the possible (or rather the variable) narrative competence of the reader, arising from practice, which enables him both to decipher more and more quickly the narrative code in general or the code appropriate to a particular genre or a particular work, and also to identify the "seeds" when they appear. […]. Moreover, this very competence is what the author relies on to tool the reader by sometimes offering him false advance mentions, or snares—well known to connoisseurs of detective stories. (76-7)