At the beginning of Middlemarch, Eliot claims to the reader through her narrator that this is going to be a realistic novel about man and the change of time. However, her employment of an intrusive omniscient narrator overtly clashes with the primary expression of realistic art-the presentation of an objective picture of life by a self-effaced narrative voice. Why does Eliot idiosyncratically deploy a narrative voice that contradicts with realism’s claim of objectivity? Through a historical discussion about the flaneur’s perception and his world, this paper argues that the intrusive narrator is Eliot’s particular design for maintaining a more truthful representation of history. In this novel, the society of Middlemarch s presented to the reader through the different perspectives of three major characters-Dorothea, Lydgate and Ladislaw. Bearing a half-participating, half-alienated relationship with their environment, the three characters’ perceptions of their society are that of a flaneur’s. They have the illuminating penetration, which the eyesight of the common mass accustomed to the ways of their society fails to reach. Nevertheless, owing to their individual inner desire, these three flaneurs are in turn blinded in their respective way. Eliot applies the metaphor of the flowing web to show the intricacy of these interweaving visions. And the use of an omniscient intrusive narrator is Eliot’s design to address the problems in seeing by tackling the dazzling phantasmagorias so that a truer vision of the world can be conveyed. Yet, regretfully, during the process she gradually loses her command of the design and the truthful representation ends up a mythical generalization.