James was a notable theoretician of fictional technique, particularly of so-called narrative point of view. Taking his cue from the “free indirect style” inaugurated by Gustave Flaubert, James stipulated again and again that the adoption of a limited point of view in which the narrator was privy to the innermost thoughts of a single character but more or less deprived, except from the evidence of conversation and gestures, of any information about the thoughts and feelings of other characters was the key to realistic and aesthetically powerful narrative. “The Altar of the Dead” adopts exclusively the point of view of Stransom, whose speculations, emotions, and intuitions are all made entirely lucid for the reader, at the same time that he acts as what James often called the “reflector” of the deeds and the possible thoughts of the other principal character. Her remaining unnamed throughout the story is possibly mannered, but it does reinforce the point that for the reader she is never fully embodied but remains an object of attention only insofar as she is of interest to and helps to illuminate the character of Stransom.

The adoption of limited omniscience serves other purposes in the tale as well, and James characteristically practices his craft with consummate skill. The entire narrative turns, in one sense, on the meaning of the character of Acton Hague, who is both the bond and the barrier between Stransom and the young lady. Given Stransom’s long-standing grievance against Hague, and his effectively having written Hague out of existence (for Stransom himself, that is), it is perfectly plausible that the reader will never learn any more about Hague than Stransom’s vague feeling of having been wronged. A different view of Hague would have been possible were the reader to have access to the nameless young lady’s thoughts, but this is precisely what the narrative technique, rigorously limiting point of view, denies the reader. The mystery of Hague, which is in a way the mystery of the entire tale, is protected by the device of narrative technique.

James’s major fiction (the bulk of his novels and some two dozen of the tales, including “The Altar of the Dead”) is dominated by the device of the secret. Diane Arbus’s famous remark about a photograph’s being “a secret about a secret; the more it tells you, the less you know,” applies with equal rigor to the fictional world of James. In learning that Acton Hague was the lover of Stransom’s younger friend, one is more, not less, in the dark about Hague than before. This is made clear in Stransom’s puzzlement over what his lady friend might have loved in his enemy, as well as in Stransom’s desire to know precisely the details of their relationship. All that the revelations in this story, including the final revelation of Stransom’s own death as the fulfillment of the design of the altar, reveal is the extent of the reader’s ignorance about the meanings of the lives of the characters. There would have been a variety of ways in which this sense of ultimate and irresolvable mystery could have been achieved, but surely the device of limited narrative point of view is one of the more effective means of maintaining the sense of ignorance and wonderment that animates James’s fiction. James’s stories manifestly reach a point of climax, customarily in the final paragraphs, but they signally lack any definitive factual or diegetic resolution. In this way, his narratives are less contemporary with those of Arthur Conan Doyle than with the antinovels of Alain Robbe-Grillet.