A
narrator is, within any
storyA narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
(literary work, movie, play, verbal account, etc.), the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the
audienceAn audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature , theatre, music or academics in any medium...
. When the narrator is also a
characterA character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the
viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for story-telling of any kind. The others are the
authorAn author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
and the
audienceAn audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature , theatre, music or academics in any medium...
; the latter called the "reader" when referring specifically to literature.
The author and the audience both inhabit the real world. It is the author's function to create the universe, people, and events within the story. It is the audience's function to understand and interpret the story. The narrator only exists
within the world of the story (and only there—although in non-fiction the narrator and the author can share the same persona, since the real world and the world of the story may be the same) and present it in a way the audience can comprehend.
A narrator may tell the story from his own point of view (as a fictive entity) or from the point of view of one of the characters in the story. The act or process of telling the particulars of a story is referred to as
narrationA narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
. Along with
expositionAt the beginning of a narrative, the exposition is the author's providing of some background information to the audience about the plot, characters' histories, setting, and theme. Exposition is considered one of four rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and narration...
, argumentation, and
descriptionDescription is one of four rhetorical modes , along with exposition, argumentation, and narration. Each of the rhetorical modes is present in a variety of forms and each has its own purpose and conventions....
, narration (broadly defined) is one of four
rhetorical modesRhetorical modes describe the variety, conventions, and purposes of the major kinds of writing. Four of the most common rhetorical modes and their purpose are exposition, argumentation, description, and narration....
of discourse. More narrowly defined, narration is the
fiction-writing modeA fiction-writing mode is a manner of writing with its own set of conventions regarding how, when, and where it should be used.Fiction is a form of narrative, one of the four rhetorical modes of discourse. Fiction-writing also has distinct forms of expression, or modes, each with its own purposes...
whereby the narrator communicates directly to the reader.
The concept of the
unreliable narratorAn unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...
(as opposed to "author") became more prominent with the rise of the novel in the
18th centurySee also: 18th century in poetry, 17th century in literature, other events of the 18th century, 19th century in literature, list of years in literature.Literature of the 18th century refers to world literature produced during the 18th century....
. Until the late 19th century,
literary criticismLiterary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
as an academic exercise dealt solely with
poetryPoetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
(including epic poems like the
IliadThe Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
and
Paradise LostParadise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...
, and poetic drama like Shakespeare). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author. But
novelA novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
s, with their immersive fictional worlds, created a problem, especially when the narrator's views differed significantly from those of the author.
Narrative modes
A writer's choice of narrator is crucial for the way a work fiction is perceived by the reader. Most narrators present their story from one of the following perspectives (called narrative modes): first-person, or third-person limited or omniscient. Generally, a
first-person narratorFirst-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
brings greater focus on the feelings, opinions, and perceptions of a particular character in a story, and on how the character views the world and the views of other characters. If the writer's intention is to get inside the world of a character, then it is a good choice, although a third-person limited narrator is an alternative that does not require the writer to reveal all that a first-person character would know. By contrast, a third-person omniscient narrator gives a panoramic view of the world of the story, looking into many characters and into the broader background of a story. A third-person omniscient narrator can tell feelings of every character. For stories in which the context and the views of many characters are important, a third-person narrator is a better choice. However, a third-person narrator does not need to be an omnipresent guide, but instead may merely be the protagonist referring to himself in the third person (also known as third person limited narrator).
Multiple narrators
A writer may choose to let several narrators tell the story from different points of view. Then it is up to the reader to decide which narrator seems most reliable for each part of the story. It may refer to the style of the writer in which he/she expresses the paragraph written. See for instance the works of
Louise ErdrichKaren Louise Erdrich, known as Louise Erdrich, is an author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American heritage. She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance...
.
William FaulknerWilliam Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
's
As I Lay Dying is a prime example of the use of multiple narrators. Faulkner employs stream of consciousness by narrating the story from the first person view of multiple characters. Each chapter is devoted to the voice of a single character after whom it is titled. Some writers employ an alternate form of this style, in which multiple characters narrate the story
at once, or at least a single character narrates the actions of a group of characters while never referring to a "me", and only to a "we" of the group. The technique of narrating from the point of view of a group as opposed to an individual can create a dissociative effect of observation, as if a
Greek chorusA Greek chorus is a homogenous, non-individualised group of performers in the plays of classical Greece, who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action....
, or personalize the story further by providing the reader with the knowledge and experience of a party involved in the story, without the unrelatable specifics of an individual personality or character. Examples of first-person plural narration include
Chuck PalahniukCharles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter...
's
Haunted and
Jeffrey EugenidesJeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer. Eugenides is most known for his first two novels, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex . His novel The Marriage Plot was published in October, 2011.-Life and career:Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan,...
's
The Virgin SuicidesThe Virgin Suicides is the 1993 debut novel by American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. The story, which is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the 1970s, centers on the suicides of five sisters. The Lisbon girls' suicides fascinate their community as their neighbors struggle to find an explanation for...
.
In literary work, the narrator is the person who tells the story. Point of view is the narrators relationship to the story. In a story using first-person point of view, the narrator is a character in the story. The reader see everything thought that character's eyes. In a work with third-person limited point of view, the narrator is outside the story and reveals the thoughts and feelings of only one character.
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