Demons is narrated by a chronicler, a resident of the town who is a friend and confidant of Stepan Trofimovich, who writes after the disaster and speaks, almost always, as a "we" of the town. He is not omniscient.
He opens the book by asking pardon for starting from far off, with Stepan's portrait, and recounts with affectionate irony what he saw and what he was told. He takes part in some scenes, such as the matinee, where he is one of the twelve "bow-tie boys," and he reconstructs from other people's memories those he did not see: twice the sentence Varvara Petrovna spoke that he will never forget, the second time with the words changed, and he narrates scenes he did not witness, such as the conversation between Liza and Stavrogin at Skvoreshniki. He includes in the chronicle, word for word, the document "From Stavrogin," correcting only the spelling, and Darya's farewell letter from Stavrogin, without correcting its stylistic errors.
The chronicler is ironic, but neither hostile nor wholly complicit, and he judges himself while judging others, because he too belongs to the town. He argues against ready-made explanations: he says he does not know what that so-called troubled time consisted of, and he refuses to point to culprits when he did not see them. When he does not know, he says that he does not know.
The choice has an effect: the truth of the story passes through filters, and the reader reads the decisive scenes with the doubt of someone who recounts them. Why does Dostoevsky need a narrator who reconstructs, rather than an omniscient one? The book does not answer, but the result is that no version goes without a counterweight, neither Pyotr's nor the town's.