Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
O.E. Rölvaag establishes himself as the all-seeing puppet-master of this book early on, referring to his characters from a distance as "he" or "she." But Rölvaag also likes to get really cozy with his characters at times, coming so close to them that their inner thoughts start to creep into his writing.
Beret's feelings toward her husband, for example, creep directly into Rölvaag's prose when he writes,
God forgive him, he was meddling with other folks' landmarks… How often she had heard it said, both here and in the old country: a blacker sin than this a man could hardly commit against his fellows! (1.4.18)
This technique of bringing a character's personal language into third-person writing is known as free indirect discourse. Not only does this technique show us the character's lives in greater depth, it also gives us a sense of how close-knit this isolated community is. When even the narrator is starting to pick up the phrasings and opinions of the characters, you have to imagine that the townsfolk are equally (at least) influenced by one another's viewpoints.