Knowledge and Nonknowledge

Reading more of The Family Mashber over the holiday I was struck by the narrative interpolations into the text. Frequently the omniscient narrator will comment on the story itself. He will tell us which knowledge we need for the story to move forward. Conversely, he will sometimes block his own view. Although this narrator, we assume, sets the rules, he will use the device of not telling us what happened between one or another of the characters. We know the narrator is omniscient, he tells us Moshe Mashber's dreams and Sruli and Luzi's dreams. But sometimes he sets boundaries to his own omniscience in a narratological version of צמצום.