单项选择题

Our task will be simpler if we begin with some stories written long before anyone worried very much about cleaning out the rhetorical imparities from the house of fiction. The stories in Boccancio"s Decameron, for example, seem extremely simple—perhaps even simple-minded and inept—if we ask of them the questions which many modern stories invite us to ask. It is bad enough that the characters are what we call two-dimensional, with no revealed depths of any kind; what is much worse, the "point of view" of the narrator shifts among them with a total disregard for the kind of technical focus or consistency generally admired today. But if we read these stories in their own terms, we soon discover a splendid and complex skill underlying the simplicity of the effect. The primary purpose of the passage is to______.