Narration, Distance and Voice

Point of view is a decision, not a label

Naming the point of view earns nothing by itself. "The passage is written in third person limited" is a fact, not an argument. What earns credit is the consequence: because the narration is limited to Wren, the reader is given her measurements of the house and never the buyer's, and so the house is never allowed to be simply a property with a price.

Narrative distance

Within third person there is a whole ladder. At the far end the narration reports only what a camera could see. One rung closer, it reports thought, but marks it as thought: she thought the room was smaller. Closer still, the marker disappears and the character's own words enter the narrator's sentences without quotation marks: The room was smaller. Smaller, and it smelled of someone else.

That last mode is free indirect discourse, and it is where most of the best evidence in a prose passage lives. The vocabulary belongs to the character; the arrangement belongs to the author. Every gap between the two is available for irony.

Voice and the gap

An unreliable narrator is not a liar. He is a narrator whose account contains more than he knows it contains. When a first-person narrator says I did what anyone would have done, the sentence tells you about the deed and, separately, about a man who needs the deed to be ordinary. Your analysis lives in that second layer.

The rule that keeps you out of trouble

Never attribute a character's judgement to the author. If Wren finds the buyer vulgar, the passage has not told you the buyer is vulgar; it has told you Wren is measuring him. Writing the author shows the buyer is a greedy man collapses the distance the author spent the whole passage building, and readers who collapse it cannot see any of the irony.