Valuing & judging

Harsh!

The narrator says Smee is:

• industrious
• obliging
• the essence of the commonplace
• infinitely pathetic, and
• pathetically unaware of how pathetic he is.

This assessment of Smee is completely different to the way he sees himself.

That's one of the great powers of the third person narrator: that they can add a contrasting perspective.

The word 'pathetic' has changed meaning over times.

The modern meaning is something like 'miserably inadequate'.

But the older meaning is a lot more along the lines of 'arousing emotion' (notice the stem –path is shared with empathy).

Over time the word evolved a meaning along the lines of 'arousing pity because of vulnerability or sadness'.

Maybe what happened was the 'vulnerability' part began to be associated with 'inferiority' and so treated with contempt, which is how we get the common modern meaning.

In the context of Peter Pan, Smee is a kind of comical, clueless innocent (for a murderous pirate) who instead of being feared by children is quite loved by them, and the narrator sort-of means 'pathetic' in an affectionate way.

Either:

• Follow the snippet, and describe a character from the narrator's point of view only. 
  • (The Peter Pan snippet doesn't mention how Smee sees himself, but even without context we can guess that Smee doesn't think of himself as pathetic.)
• Follow the examples, and include some description about what the character thinks or feels, and then have the narrator add a different perspective.

Either is fine, but the example approach is probably clearer for a standalone snippet like this.