Narrator

Uri Margolin Created: 23. May 2012 Revised: 26. January 2014

Definition

In the literal sense, the term “narrator” designates the inner-textual (textually encoded)
highest-level speech position from which the current narrative discourse as a whole originates
and from which references to the entities, actions and events that this discourse is about are
being made. Through a dual process of metonymic transfer and anthropomorphization, the term
narrator is then employed to designate a presumed textually projected occupant of this position,
the hypothesized producer of the current discourse, the individual agent who serves as the
answer to Genette’s question qui parle? The narrator, which is a strictly textual category, should
be clearly distinguished from the author (Schönert → Author) who is of course an actual person.

Explication

A narrator is a linguistically indicated, textually projected and readerly constructed function,

slot or category whose occupant need not be thought of in any terms but those of a
communicative role. Terms designating this role include discursive function or role, voice,
source of narrative transmission, producer of current discourse, teller, reporter, narrating
agent or instance. The position occupied by this presumed inner-textual originator of the
discourse functions as a logico-linguistic center for all spatio-temporal and personal
references occurring in the discourse, i.e. as highest-level center of the discourse. An
inner-textual narrator can in principle be assigned to any narrative text, not just a fictional one,
and such ascription does not require any knowledge about the actual world producer of the
words of the text, be it a human being or a computer program. The linguistically projected
narrator and the actual world producer will be confronted at a later stage (3.6).

Good reasons, stemming from text linguistics, philosophy, narratology and common sense,
can be adduced for the necessity or at least advisability of granting the narrator category as
defined above a central place in the description and interpretation, both informal and
professional, of literary narratives. In Benveniste’s (1966) and Jakobson’s (1971) text
linguistics, any utterance is described as consisting of two indissoluble components: the
speech event (énonciation, saying) and that which is said (énoncé) to which correspond,
respectively, the sayer (sujet de l’énonciation) and the one spoken of (sujet de l’énoncé).
Since narrative utterances are a subset of the universe of utterances, they too must therefore
contain a sayer. For narrative, the terms thus translate into narration, narrated event, narrator
and narrated agent(s), respectively. A narrator can thus be defined as the sujet de
l’énonciation of one or more utterances that represents an event (Coste 1989: 166). In terms
of linguistic pragmatics or speech act theory, any narrative, regardless of its length, is a macro
speech act of the constative type, claiming that such and such happened. For a claim to be
made, there needs to be an agent who makes this claim, hence the narrator. If narrative is a
report of acts and events, we need a reporter behind it, and if it is a tale, we need a teller. In
terms of communication theory, any act of communication consists of a sender sending a
message to a receiver. A narrative consists of someone telling someone else that something
 happened, and no such act can be imagined without a sender-narrator position. Even a failed,
confused or contradictory act of reporting presupposes a narrator no less than a successful
one.

History of the Concept and its Study

Plato was the first to claim that the underlying difference between narrative and drama as basic
types of discourse consists in the difference between directly showing and indirectly telling or
reporting, rooted in the absence or presence respectively of a mediating instance between the
characters’ speech and the audience. And the narrator is precisely this mediating instance.
Modern arguments for mediacy as the generic hallmark of narrative can be found in Friedemann
([1910] 1965) and Stanzel ([1955] 1971). In contemporary narratology it is customary to
distinguish between three functions which are essential to give rise to any narrative: doing,
seeing and saying (Bal 1981: 45). Thus, characters do certain things which are viewed from a
certain perspective, and what is seen is then reported. To these three functions there correspond
three roles: narrative agent, focalizer (which has been a subject of scholarly controversy) and
narrator. Baxtin’s ([1934/35] 1981) influential theory of the novel, which can be generalized to all
narrative, regards the novel as the site of interplay between two kinds of utterances: those
stemming from the characters and those stemming from an inner textual narrator. The whole
essence of narrative would be missed if one were to deny the textual existence of a narrator as a
stylistic and ideological position. Finally, psychonarratology (e.g. Bortolussi & Dixon 2003) has
shown that readers process literary narratives in the same way as they do ordinary
communication insofar as they assume a textually encoded conversational partner responsible
for the contents of the narrative. This mimetic-illusionist assumption a bout the nature and status
of the narrator has recently come under scrutiny by cognitively-oriented narratologists (Nünning
2001; Fludernik 2003; Herman → Cognitive Narratology). On this view, both narrated world and
narrator are not inherent to the text, but rather constructed in readers’ minds at the point of
intersection of individual textual data and general cognitive categories possessed by these
readers .A literary narrative is consequently a text capable of creating in the reader’s mind the
representational illusion of observing an ongoing process of narrative communication in which a
more or less personalized narrator plays a key role. Identifying and characterizing such a
narrator is an optional naturalization or meaning creation strategy open to the reader and building
upon two kinds of input: textual signals and storytelling scenarios (frames, schemes) the reader
already possesses from his real-life experience and which are activated once a certain number of
narrator indicators have been identified in the text (Emmott & Alexander → Schemata). Works
which destroy the illusion of an independently existing narrated domain may still produce a
powerful representational illusion of narrative activity with a narrator figure behind it. One can say
in conclusion that the notion of narrator has been approached and defined in terms of three
distinct theoretical frameworks (Grall 2007): rhetoric (speech act, communication); narratology
(mediation, interplay of utterances); and cognitive science (reader psychology and models of text
comprehension).

Identifying the Narrator: Constitutive Conditions

Some narrators are more marked and individuated than others. But what are the minimal
textual conditions under which one could identify a distinct narrating position or voice? Such
conditions could be represented as a hierarchical series. The text must be capable of being
naturalized as representing one or more reporting utterances or speech acts stemming from
 one or more agents. Some texts, classified as narratives in our culture, such as unframed
interior monologues (Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else) or textes-limites of modernism or
postmodernism, do not satisfy this requirement and consequently cannot be considered as
possessing any inscribed originators. The second condition is that it should be possible to
demarcate the utterances of which the text consists and assign each of them to a distinct
voice or originator. (It is only in rare cases that all utterances recorded in a text were originally
made by one speaker at one time.) The third condition is that one should be able to determine
the hierarchical relations between the different utterances and their originators, as defined by
such questions as who can quote whom, who can refer to whom and who can report about
whom (Margolin 1991), but also to determine the total number of such originators and levels
of speech in the text. Finally, and most crucially, one should be able to identify a single,
highest-level originator of all originators, so to speak: one general, primary or global textual
narrating voice, such that (a) the text as a whole can be seen as a macro speech act or
utterance emanating from that voice, and (b) all textually occurring utterances originating with
other speakers are embedded within this macro speech act, that is, are merely quoted or
mentioned in it. There is no algorithm for deciding whether any or all of the above conditions
are satisfied by a given text even though readers make such decisions semi-intuitively all the
time. The muse who provides the answer to the epic question at the beginning of the Iliad is
the earliest Western example of such a global narrator, but this occurs also with the
anonymous voices relating the whole of War and Peace or Père Goriot. When it is not
possible to identify a single highest-level narrator, we are dealing with multi-narrator
narratives (Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury, Orhan Pamuk’s My Name
is Red) in which different textual segments consist of reports stemming from different
speakers, none of whom occupy a position higher than the others. “Narrator” in the
prototypical sense, however, designates the single, unified, stable, distinct human-like voice
who produces the whole narrative discourse we are reading. In general, although not
universally, this discourse assumes the shape of an account of independently existing and
known facts. Going one step further, the narrator can be envisioned as a fictional agent who is
part of the story world and whose task it is to report from within it on events in this world which
are real or actual for him (Thomson-Jones 2007: 78).

“Unnatural Voices” in Postmodern Narratives

Richardson (2006) described the difficulty in pinning down and defining a single or unified or
stable highest-level narrator position in many postmodern texts, even though they contain
numerous signs of narrator and narrational activity alike. In such texts, of which Beckett’s
Trilogy is the showcase, it is sometimes impossible to locate a constant highest-level narrator,
and even if one is locatable, this utterer has no voice of his own or is mimetically impossible.
The first case involves either a constant reversal of levels between quoter and quoted where
“the one you invented has invented you” (Beckett), or an open-ended regression of levels
where whenever we think we have finally reached the primary textual speaker, the unquoted
quoter, it turns out that this discourse, too, is in fact being quoted by a still higher-level voice.
In the second case, the highest-level speaker is a mere conduit or “mouth” (Beckett) voicing a
discourse whose inscribed originator is someone else, so that all tokens of “I” in this discourse
designate not the utterer, but that “cantankerous other” (Beckett). The net result is that “I
seem to speak, it is not I; about me—but it is not about me” (Beckett). The supposedly
highest-level voice ends up lacking all identity, as it is merely a “ghost writer” for another or
the mere conduit for another’s discourse or an impersonator speaking as another (Margolin
1986/87). In the mimetically impossible case (Richardson 2006: 103–05), the primary speaker
 turns out to be a number of distinct voices which merge without any explanation, which
contain so much incommensurable information that they cannot be unified into one speech
position or whose level is indeterminate and floating between the character, narrator and
persona of the biographical author, as when such a narrator claims to have invented figures in
other texts by the same author (e.g. Beckett’s Trilogy). Finally, a specific highest-level
individual voice cannot be identified in a discourse consisting of a verbal collage of recycled
clichés from media reports, advertising and the like (Petersen 1993: 138).

Individuating the Narrator

When a primary global narrator can be defined for a given narrative, the discourse as a whole
can be viewed as its macro speech act. Individuating the narrator in a literary fictional context
means constructing or inferring an image of the utterer with the sole means for so doing being
the verbal record of his speech act. This task needs to be guided by two theoretical
frameworks: linguistic pragmatics, which seeks to define the time, place, and context of
utterance and the utterer’s capabilities, beliefs and communicative intentions; and the
cognitive psychological theory of attribution, which seeks to infer from a behavior, including
verbal, the dispositions and attitudes of the agent (Margolin 1986). Now literary texts vary
enormously as regards the kinds and the amount of clues they provide for this purpose and
the resultant textual markedness of the narrator or “degree of narratorhood” (Chatman’s
term). At degree zero we have the impersonal or transparent mode of narration associated
with an anonymous voice or covert (effaced, imperceptible) narrator coming from nowhere
and announcing categorically that “once upon a time there was.” At the other end stands the
perceptible, dramatized or personal mode of narration associated with an overt narrator who
could say things like “Living now in my old age in the city of NN, I still remember with great
affection what X did 30 years ago.” Obviously, the greater the number and diversity of the
textual elements available for speaker indication, the richer the resultant speaker image.
Once again, the two extremes would be a mere voice with no psychological person behind it
and a concrete figure with both an inner life and a body.

Types of Utterances

One major source of data for building the image of the narrator is claims occurring in his/her
discourse that go beyond the strict reporting of individual facts. These include summaries,
analyses, comments, and generalizations of various kinds, all concerning the narrated
domain. Chatman (1978) has proposed a useful typology of such claims in ascending order
from set descriptions and temporal summaries to reports of what characters did not do, say or
think, then to explanations, interpretations and judgments of reported actions or characters,
and ending with generalizations of any kind, including purported general truths, maxims and
norms of action which go well beyond the reported events. The extent of such claims varies
enormously from one author to the other, two extremes being Hemingway and Henry James.
The aesthetic desirability of such narratorial “intrusions” or “telling” beyond mere “showing”
has been the object of heated critical debate since the 19th century (e.g. Otto Ludwig [1977],
Friedrich Spielhagen [1883] 1967, Käte Friedemann [1910] 1965, Percy Lubbock [1921] 1947
and Wayne C. Booth [1961] 1983). Critics for whom narratorial mediation is a mere
handmaiden for showing camera-like what happened would advocate the avoidance of all
such material and consider it a mere deviation detracting from the effectiveness of the
 narration. Conversely, those for whom mediation is the very essence of narrative as
distinguished from drama would consider such material as radical enrichment of “mere
reporting.”

Situational Indicators

The types of utterances just mentioned help us individuate the narrator as a mind, so to
speak. But what about him/her as a person in a communicative situation? Here linguistic
features play the major role. Doležel (1967) has outlined several such features, again in
hierarchical order. First is the use of first- and second-person pronouns to indicate the
presence of the originator and the inscribed addressee of the current speech event, both of
whom are absent in third-person discourse. Next is the use of all three major tenses,
especially of the present tense, to indicate the current communicative transaction relative to
which all narrated events are temporally ordered. In pure third-person past-tense narration, on
the other hand, the past tense is not related to any particular speech situation, but is more
aspectual, merely indicative of the narrated events already having taken place. Third is the
use of deictics (demonstratives, indexicals, shifters) of time and place such as “now,” “here,”
“lately,” “yesterday,” etc. relating the narrated events to a present speaker and his embodied
space-time position. Another major element is address to the inscribed narratee, such as the
famous “Dear reader,” consisting of questions and admonitions and providing the speaking
voice with immediacy, projecting an ongoing communicative exchange (telling) in addition to
what is being narrated (told). Such address is part of the rhetorical strategy employed by the
narrator, and embodies his/her communicative intentions. Equally important is the use of
subjective semantics, expressing the narrating instance’s attitudes and reactions to the
narrated events, which both adds a strong personal element and functions as part of the
teller’s rhetorical strategy vis-à-vis the addressee. A final individuating feature is a personal
style of narration, indicative of a particular mind style.

Narration-oriented Utterances

Narratorial comments are focused on the narrated, while the linguistic features listed above
may be indicative of the narrated or the narration. The fullest systematic picture of elements in
the communicative situation (narration) which help characterize the narrator can be provided
by using Jakobson’s model of verbal communication (1960), five of whose six functions are
concerned with enunciation. The expressive function is concerned with the speaker’s
self-reference, self-characterization, and expression of emotions and attitudes. The conative
or appellative functions may create the illusion of face-to-face communication where the
addressee is urged to listen, understand, sympathize, etc., not only with respect to the
narrated, but also regarding the narrator and his current activity. Metalinguistic references to
the medium employed (oral or written) and its limitations again highlight the narrator’s present
act of telling, and so do discussions of the appropriateness and potentialities of the type of
discourse selected (letter, diary, confession, report). And finally, there are of course
references to the current narrating activity and its linguistic embodiment as it is being
produced.
 As Prince (1982) and Nünning (1989) have noted, the greater the number of signs of the
narration compared to those of the narrated, the more marked the narrator and his activity
become. An extreme example is provided by postmodern narratives where hardly any story gets
told, since most of the text is concerned with the process of telling and its difficulties and with the
figure of the teller and his struggle to tell (Neumann & Nünning → Metanarration and
Metafiction). Finally, when the telling process is foregrounded and presented as durative (taking
days, months or years), it is possible to draw conclusions not only with respect to some of the
narrator’s mental and physical traits, but also as regards possible changes to these features in
the course of the narration.

Major Aspects of a Narrator’s Image

Once a certain amount of individuating information about the narrator has been garnered from
the textual data listed above, one could attempt to draw an image of this narrator as a human
or human-like figure. Now in principle any physical, mental or behavioral aspect of the
narrator could enter such a picture, but as regards those aspects most closely tied to the
defining teller role, the following have been suggested by various narratologists: degree and
kind(s) of knowledge possessed; reliability; relation to various components of the speech act
performed; articulateness; attitude towards the narrated (straightforward, ironic, sympathetic,
etc.); projected teller role.

Knowledge

Once a global narrator has been identified in a discourse, all information about the narrated
domain, including characters’ direct discourse, originates with that narrator. Now the
knowledge a narrator may have about any of the characters may be restricted to what can be
garnered from sense impressions, or it may include direct access to their minds, something
not possible outside fiction (® focalization). Even if restricted to external data, a narrator may
know more, the same as or less than one or more of his characters, and he may also withhold
information from his addressee. One egregious example is Agatha Christie’s The Murder of
Roger Ackroyd, where the narrator withholds the crucial information that he himself is the
murderer. Some, but by no means all, anonymous narrating voices telling their story in the
third-person past tense are endowed with omniscience: “Familiarity, in principle, with the
characters’ innermost thought and feelings; knowledge of past, present and future; presence
in locations where characters are supposed to be unaccompanied […]; and the knowledge of
what happened in several places at the same time” (Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 2003: 96). And
such panoramic or Olympian knowledge can be fully authoritative, not open to any challenge
or enquiry. This is the maximal degree and kind of knowledge any narrator can possess, and
the possibility of any narrating instance possessing such knowledge is the most basic
constitutive convention of all fiction writing. As soon as the narrator becomes personalized,
knowledge claims begin to be restricted in scope and kind to the humanly possible (unless the
speaker is a supernatural entity) and are open to modalization (“it seems,” “probably,” “as far
as can be known”) and thus the challenge of limited epistemic authority. Because of their
rhetorical needs, authors sometimes endow personalized narrators with intermittent
omniscience. The highly personalized narrator of Proust’s first-person novel À la Recherche
du temps perdu can thus on occasion report with certainty about what another person thought
or what happened when someone was all by himself.
Reliability

Personalized narrators, and only personalized ones, may on occasion be deemed by the
reader as unreliable, meaning that the validity of some or even all claims made by them is low
or non-existent, that these claims need consequently to be rejected and, if possible, replaced
by more valid, reader-formulated ones regarding the given topic. (Notice, though, that if the
narrator is cast in the role not of a reporter of facts but of an inventor of tales, unreliability is
inapplicable [Walton 1990: 374–75].) Following Phelan & Martin (1999), one can distinguish
three axes of unreliability: facts and events of the narrated domain; the interpretation of such
facts (i.e. supplied inferences, explanations or motivations); moral, practical, aesthetic, etc.
judgments and evaluations of these facts. While the first two kinds of reliability are epistemic,
the third is clearly axiological and normative. Moreover, unreliability of factual claims is the
most radical, since it may prevent us from figuring out what the narrative world was “really”
like. A narrator may himself alter the reliability of any of his claims by citing lack of information
or inability on his part to fathom things. There are numerous indicators of narratorial factual
unreliability (cf. D’hoker & Martens eds. 2008) including paratextual and intertextual elements
such as title (Diary of a Madman) or a narrator figure falling clearly under a codified unreliable
literary type (picaro, scoundrel). In multiple narrator texts (3.4), conflicts between the reports
on the same events by different narrators indicate that at least one of them is unreliable. In
realistic literature, a major clash between our world knowledge (extra-textual information) and
claims made by the narrator may also serve as such an indicator (Hansen 2007).
Inner-textual indicators of factual unreliability are inconsistency and incongruity between
claims made by the narrator regarding the same events, while illogicality, invalid or
non-sequitur inferences as well as explanations and generalizations lacking any evidence are
grounds for deeming narratorial interpretations of fact unreliable. Strong conflict with the
moral or aesthetic norms held by the reader are grounds for rejecting narratorial judgments. In
the factual and interpretative cases, one also assumes that the events of the narrated domain
are in and by themselves amenable to a consistent description and that valid generalizations
and explanations of this domain are possible. Narratorial unreliability is ultimately a readerly
computational hypothesis adopted in order to explain the origin of inconsistencies and
incongruities in the narrated world, a crucial point first made by Yacobi (1981). To claim that
the narration of a given story is unreliable is to assume the existence of a personalized
mediator with human-like cognitive and sensory capabilities whose erroneous or aberrant
mind can serve as the source of all textual incongruities with respect to the narrated domain
(Marcus 2007).

Once we are ready to psychologize the narrator, we could seek for mental explanations for
the unreliability of some or all of his claims. Depending on the particular text, such grounds
could be the narrator’s lack of knowledge or experience, mental deficiencies ranging from
limited intelligence to insanity or drug-induced hallucinations, self-deception (in cases of
autobiographical narration), a particular mental disposition (the chronic liar), and a deliberate
deceptive strategy. Creating a narrator figure whom readers will deem unreliable redirects
attention from the told to the telling and the teller, from what is known and evaluated to the
circumstances and activities of informing and judging, and to the person failing to perform
them properly.

Relation to the Narrative Act

 From the speech act of narration one can construct an image of its performer along three
major axes: status, involving the speaker’s relation to his speaking activity; contact, involving
the speaker-audience relation; and stance, involving the relation between the speaker and the
topic of his discourse. Such is the key thesis of Lanser (1981), the most comprehensive
account to date of the narrator in terms of speech act theory. Status covers, among other
things, social identity, extent of knowledge, presentation of the told as report or invention, and
“mimetic authority” encompassing sincerity and honesty or their absence, trustworthiness
(both intellectual and moral), and competence or skill at telling. Contact includes the teller’s
attitude towards his inscribed addressee: formality to intimacy, deference to contempt;
self-reference and direct address or the absence of both; the teller’s attitude towards his
activity including self-confidence or hesitancy, consciousness of this activity of telling and
reference to it or lack of both. Stance is a more heterogeneous category, but most important
probably is the narrator’s relation to his characters: adopting or not adopting their language
and/or spatio-temporal perspective and/or values (Lanser 1981: 224). Lanser’s pragmatics of
narration follows in the footsteps of classical rhetoric where a speaker is regarded as a
human subject with various emotions (pathos), values (ethos) and intentions and who,
through the organization and manner of delivery of his discourse, seeks to mold in particular
ways the attitudes, emotions and judgments of his addressees (Grall 2007: 253–54).

Articulateness

Under this heading is understood the manner of telling, especially those stylistic choices that
help characterize the speaker’s discourse and, by metonymic transfer, the speaker’s mind as
sophisticated, abstract, complex and rational or their opposite, finely nuanced or simplistic,
emotional and immediate or rational and distanced, and so on. While such qualifications
cannot be strictly defined in any systematic and exhaustive manner, they form an important
part of our personality sketch of the narrator as perceiver, chronicler and analyst of the
narrated world. Our corresponding judgment of him as intelligent and perceptive or not will
have a decisive influence on our assessment of his credibility and ultimately on how much of
what he claims about the narrated domain we are ready to accept.

Attitude to the Narrated

Equally incapable of formal definition and failsafe determination, yet every bit as important, is
the narrator’s attitude towards the told, as manifested in the way characters and events are
represented. An open-ended list of qualifiers would include neutral vs. judgmental,
sympathetic vs. detached, involved vs. distanced, cynical, sentimental, emotionally charged,
curious, amused, bewildered, and so on. The relation between the tone or manner of telling
and its subject matter can itself serve as the basis for second-order characterization of the
speaker. Speaking in a cold, distanced manner about an atrocity may lead us to characterize
the speaker as heartless or as doing his best to hide his emotions, depending on the context
(Margolin 1986). The drawing of such inferences is not an exact science, for it depends on the
specific inner-textual contexts as well as on the reader’s cultural context; even so, such
inferencing plays an important role in any portrait of the narrator drawn by the reader.

Projected Teller Role

 The last key aspect of the narrator’s image is his/her textually projected role. Is the narrator
presented as a reporter (chronicler, biographer, historian, eye witness) who vouches for the
truth of his assertions regarding the narrated? Or as an editor or publisher transmitting and
vouching for the prior existence and/or authenticity of the documents (letters, diaries) he is
presenting (though not necessarily for the veracity of the claims made in them)? Or as an
author-fabricator, a storyteller engaged in the invention of stories, perhaps with a playful
attitude? Or maybe as an oral teller, as in the skaz tradition, presenting a story to a live
audience with a focus on the performative or transmissive aspect, on oral address and
unmediated audience response? (For the underlying functions, see Ryan 2001; for the key
properties of the narrator in his teller role, see Booth [1961] 1983 and Petersen 1993.)

Plurivocal and Multi-level Narration

Some narratives do not have a general or global narrator, so that the events on the narrated
level are related by numerous independent partial narrators, neither of whom refers to the
discourse of the others, thus creating “narrative parataxis” (Coste 1989: 173). Now these
partial narrators need not be participants in the narrated events, as when three contemporary
historians tell the story of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia. Furthermore, each of them may
narrate a different phase of the total action sequence, a pattern labeled “narrative relay”
(Coste 1989: 173), or the same events may be covered by all of them in converging or
diverging ways. In fictional narratives, one encounters both patterns, but with the difference
that the narrators are normally also participants in the events they narrate. Since each
character-narrator possesses his own perspective or “take” on the events, the net result is
multi-perspectival narration where there exist two or more narrating instances who portray the
same events in different ways, each from his own standpoint (Nünning 2001: 18). An
epistolary novel consisting entirely of correspondence between two or more persons is a
plurivocal narration in which each letter writer reports on and discusses events concerning
himself, his addressee or some third party. An epistolary novel with a framing editor’s
discourse turns this editor into the global narrator, since all the embedded letters are basically
quoted by him, the text as a whole constituting a two-level narrative.

In general, a narrative can comprise several hierarchically ordered levels of narration, each with
its own narrator. In such cases, the primary narrator is the one who introduces or quotes all the
others, without himself being introduced by any of them; the secondary narrator is introduced or
quoted by the first and introduces in his turn all lower-level narrators, and so on. This
story-within-a-story phenomenon has been described by Nelles (2005: 134) as a “structure by
which a character in a narrative text becomes the narrator of a second narrative text framed by
the first one,” i.e. where one narrator’s discourse embeds that of another at a subordinate level.
While the primary narrator may remain a disembodied voice, all lower-level narrators are
characters with respect to the primary one and must therefore be individuated to some degree
with respect to verbal, mental, behavioral and physical features. Embedded narrators (Coste &
Pier → Narrative Levels), too, can function either as reporters, in which case issues of reliability
are paramount, or as storytellers, where their skill at story telling and its impact on their destiny
are key (Walton 1990: 369–72).

Narrators and Characters

 When a narrator employs tokens of “I” and “you” in his discourse, these tokens automatically
refer to him in his current speaker role and to his inscribed addressee as participants in the
ongoing communicative transaction. But these tokens may also refer to speaker and addressee
as entities existing beyond the sphere of narration as objects of telling (=characters, narrative
agents) in the narrated sphere. And as characters (Jannidis → Character), they may be located
at points in space and time beyond the narration’s here and now. Insofar as narrators have
themselves as narrative agents, they are engaged in producing a first-person narrative, whereas
if it is their addressees who act as narrative agents, a second-person narrative is being
produced. If the entities referred to in the narrator’s discourse are not part of the current
communicative situation, then a third-person narrative is produced. (Note that it is quite possible
to have a third-person narrative in which the speaker and the addressee in their communicative
roles are quite prominent.) Put differently, the referents of first- and second-person narratives
participate in both story and discourse systems and those of third-person narratives in the story
system only. Using the narrated system as our point of departure, the main distinction is between
narratives in which the narrator also participates in the narrated events (first-person narrative)
and those in which he does not (second- and third-perso23

Several unusual forms of narration merit special attention with regard to the
narrator-character relation. One is the impersonal “one” form where the pronoun can
designate anyone and everybody who is or would be in the situation portrayed, including the
narrator himself. But this particular pronoun endows narration with a depersonalized aura.
The “you” form automatically picks out the inscribed addressee and can pick out any reader
who is ready to put himself imaginatively in this addressee’s situation. But what if the
narrator’s claims are about a “you” in a separate narrated sphere, possibly also distinct in
space and time from the narrational sphere? Why tell the addressee his own life story? And
how possible is it for a personalized narrator to have access to this “you’s” interiority? No one
motivation is possible, only a series of local context-dependent ones (Fludernik ed. 1994).
“We”-narrative concerning not speaker and addressee, but rather the speaker and other(s) in
a distinct narrated sphere, is especially tricky. “We” is always I+other(s). So is it the whole
group speaking in unison, like the chorus in Greek tragedy, or one speaker only? And if this
speaker is one, is he an authorized spokesperson for the group? “We”-narratives may serve
as tools for constructing a group’s sense of cohesion and identity, but mental access by the
we-narrator is necessarily curtailed. Since we=I+other(s), whenever a text using a first-person
plural pronoun seeks to depict the thoughts of other(s) beyond the speaker, it necessarily
straddles the line between first- and third-person narration: a character discloses that which
can only be known by an external, impersonal intelligence, that is, an omniscient narrative
voice. Such narratives are thus simultaneously first- and third-person discourses,
transcending this basic narratological divide (Richardson 2006: 60).

When speaking about his own discourse, the narrator normally adopts his own current
epistemic and evaluative perspective, although he can adopt the presumed perspective of his
inscribed addressee, as in: “Is it ever boring, listening to you.” When making claims about the
narrated domain, the narrator can engage his own perspective, but alternatively he may take
on the perspective of a character, speaking “[a]s though he himself were […] in the
epistemological position he attributes to a character, reporting what he takes this character to
know” (Walton 1990: 379). In the case of the autodiegetic (=autobiographical) narrator, the
character whose epistemological position he adopts may be himself at a different time,
usually in the past, but possibly also a projected future version of himself. In his study of
Dostoevskij’s poetics, Baxtin ([1929] 1984) showed the myriad ways in which a character’s
 perspective can be incorporated into the narrator’s discourse, ranging from harmony up to
sharp internal dissonance and parodic inversion. Free indirect discourse, one of the hallmarks
of fiction writing, is a linguistic form combining the narrator’s deictic position and the
character’s idiom and semantics. Finally, a narrator can speak of himself qua narrative agent
as of another, that is, in the second or third person (e.g. Caesar in De bello gallico). The
reasons for such a deictic shift are numerous and local, but the transfer can never encompass
the whole text; otherwise, it will not be identifiable.

Alternative Models

The narrator figure presented so far is the one postulated or constructed in standard, classical
narratology. As we have seen, it is based on three assumptions, namely, that for every work
of narrative fiction:

(a) there exists a specifiable inner-textual, highest -level speech or communication

position functioning as the point of origin of the current discourse. In other words,
all narrative fiction is communication.

(b) There is always an individual figure or agency occupying this speech position
and thus backing the assertions contained in the narrative discourse or presenting
the fictional world to us (Kania 2005).

(c) This individual figure or agency exists on the strictly fictional level, and is a
distinct entity within the fictional universe projected by the text.

Thus, in writing down his text, the flesh and blood author gives rise to a substitutionary
speaker who performs the macro speech act of reporting and who is solely responsible for all
claims, specific or general, made in this report (Ryan 1981, Martínez-Bonati 1996). In writing
down his actual text and communicating it to actual readers, the author thus projects or
evokes the image of an act(ivity) of narrative communication between a fictional narrator and
his fictional narratee(s). (Schmid 2005: 45-6). This fictional narrator is assumed to be a
constituent of every work of narrative fiction and hence a universal, indispensable component
of any narratological model. Note that the three claims listed above form a hierarchical order,
so that one cannot assert (c) without asserting (a) and (b), or assert (b) without asserting (a).
Conversely, one can reject (c) and yet maintain (a) and (b), or deny both (c) and (b) and still
keep (a). And of course one can deny all three claims. Over time, and even more so in the
last decade, challenges to one or more of these three assumptions or claims have been
issued by linguists (Banfield, Kuroda), philosophers (Hamburger, Currie, Wilson, Kania), and
literary scholars (most prominently Patron [2010], but also Walsh [1997] and Koeppe &
Stuehring [2011]). All of these challenges deny at least the pan-narrator claim, the claim about
the “ubiquity of the non-actual fact telling narrator” (Alward), no matter how textually
unmarked or effaced, by turning such a narrator into a mere option within the narratological
model, to be applied to a given narrative only if warranted by the existence in the text of
 certain textual features. Hamburger [1957] 1993 for example has argued on philosophical
grounds that one can meaningfully speak of a narrator figure only in first person narratives,
while in all other cases the narrator is a mere metonymy for a presentational textual function.
Banfield (1982) has argued on linguistic grounds that the notion of narrator is meaningful and
warranted only in cases of overt, foregrounded narration similar to the oral one, such as the
skaz (which is of course third person narration).

As soon as the universality of the fictional narrator is rejected, a uniform treatment of all
varieties of narrative fiction is no longer possible, and the one, universal model is replaced
with a whole set of options, alternatives or partial models, each of them being deemed the
most appropriate or warranted in some case or another. But why stop with (c)? In fact,
assumption (b) and even (a) can, and have been, rejected by some scholars at least for some
(types of) texts. Sylvie Patron for example (Patron 2010) claims that not all works of narrative
fiction can be justifiably regarded as acts of communication, thus denying the universality of
(a). Some works of narrative fiction are similar to Benveniste’s histoire, and hence better
regarded as non-communication, so the argument goes, since it is not possible to define in
them a global, inner textual speech position functioning as point of origin of the discourse as a
whole. In such works, one might add, the marginalized or non- existent communicative
function is replaced by the dominance of the presentational one. And on this
non-communicative (or semantic-oriented) view it is expressions by themselves that can refer,
and the entities in the narrated domain can be established without recourse to a particular
speech position. Accepting just assumption (a) as universal would imply viewing narrative
texts as consisting of an interplay of two kinds of discourses, defined by such hierarchical
(hence anti-symmetrical) relations as dominant and subordinate, embedded and embedding,
quoting and quoted, referring and referred to. The dominant discourse is associated with the
highest -level speech position and is for convenience’s sake referred to as the discourse of
the narrator, while the subordinate discourses are associated with the speech positions of
characters. Yet one deals here with linguistic and discursive functions or roles only, and stops
short of any attempt to anthropomorphise them, to identify and characterize any specific
human- or human-like individuals who occupy the respective positions. Stylistic and
ideological features, rather than pragmatic or individual- psychological ones, are the ones to
be associated with each speech position. (Baxtin).

Accepting assumptions (a) and (b) while rejecting (c) opens up three options as to the identity
of the occupant of the narrator position. One is obviously (c) itself, the maximalist view which
is precisely the one being rejected. The other one is the minimalist: the occupant of the
highest- level speech position in a work of narrative fiction is always the actual author, but in a
ludic or make-believe guise, feigning the making of true assertions, and sometimes also
pretending to be someone else. And there is also the middle position: if we replace
essentialism with instrumentalism and universal claims with qualified existential ones, we can
regard the author in a make-believe mode and the fictional narrator as two co-existing
options. In some cases the first would be the better warranted by the text, while in others the
second would be more appropriate. The choice is thus between a fictional individual who
reports seriously of facts in the narrated domain as known to him, and the actual
author-performer merely feigning, pretending or playing the role of a reporter of facts, or a
maker of true factual assertions, while in actuality he is their inventor (Searle’s illocutionary
pretense. See Searle 1975). In terms of rules of procedure or methodological norms, two
opposing norms can be envisioned. The first would claim that the default case of the
 originator of the narration is the fictional narrator, and good reasons should be provided
whenever one rejects this option in favour of the author-cum-fabulator one. The opposite
norm, advocated by some philosophers, is that the default case is the author as
fabulator-pretender, and good reasons should be provided whenever one posits instead a
fictional individual as teller-reporter. The most crucial case is that of heterodiegetic (third
person), impersonal narration, where the highest textual speaker position is occupied by an
anonymous, unindividuated voice (“geistig und abstrakt” in Thomas Mann’s words) or, in other
words, where the speaker position is unmarked. It is precisely in such cases, several scholars
have argued, that it is totally unwarranted to fill the teller slot with a fictional individual figure of
an “effaced” narrator. In such cases, so the argument goes, it makes much more sense to
make the actual author in his role as pretender the originator of the discourse. Such
narratives are hence “narratorless” in that they do not satisfy (c), while still possessing (b).

If we adopt an instrumentalist view of theories, regarding them as cognitive tools rather than
ontological commitments, once could now quickly assess the relative cost/benefit of
postulating a fictional narrator vs. an author as pretender in cases of third person impersonal
narration. Quite obviously, the advantages of one position are the shortcomings of the other
and vice versa. The advantages of the author as pretender are as follows: this position
conforms with Occam’s dictum that entities (and, one might add, especially fictional ones)
should not be multiplied beyond necessity. It also conforms to David Lewis’ principle of
minimal departure for fictional worlds, which states that a fictional world should be assumed to
be as similar as possible to the actual one unless explicitly specified otherwise. (Lewis 1978).
And this view further enables us to tackle in a straightforward manner the issue of narrative
style and composition. It is thus the actual author in his role as pretend-reporter who makes
all of the stylistic and compositional choices regarding the narration. And finally, adopting this
view provides continuity with a long tradition harking back to Antiquity. Conversely, sticking
with the always a fictional narrator position, even in the case of impersonal third person
narration, preserves the absolute distinction between the fictional and the actual, as well as
providing a uniform treatment along a continuum for all varieties of narrative fiction, instead of
splitting the domain into radically heterogeneous sub-domains. And it is also simpler, since it
involves a semantic consideration only, and does not require pragmatic considerations about
actual people playing specific, culturally defined pretend roles. Arguments for and against
each position keep being offered in the research literature, but it may be our deeply held
fundamental views on the relation between art and actuality, rather than methodological
considerations, which ultimately make us adopt one of the two positions.

Topics for Further Investigation

(a) The image of the textual speaker as constructed in the context of fiction writing should be
examined in its relation to the projected speaker image in lyrical poetry (persona) and in
non-fictional narratives. (b) It is assumed here that the diarist and letter writer are narrators,
yet Chatman (1978) denies this: is it because he implicitly identifies narrator with global
narrator? (c) Can narrators be focalizers, and if so, when and to what extent? This problem
has not been touched upon here, yet is the subject of extensive debate in the critical
literature. (d) This entry makes no use of the notion of ® implied author, which the present
writer finds redundant in a communication -based model. However, the implied author
appears in almost every discussion of the narrator. Should this be the case? (e) Narrator
unreliability as regards judgments and evaluations has been treated here entirely as a matter
 of readers’ criteria, unlike factual unreliability, for which there are objective inner-textual
indicators. Why has this view emerged only recently, and is the resistance to it associated
with the implied author postulate?

Bibliography

Works Cited

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Further Reading

● Alward, Peter (2007). “For the Ubiquity of Nonactual Fact-Telling Narrators.” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, 401–04.
● Blödorn, Andreas, et al., eds. (2006). Stimme(n) in Texten: Narratologische
Positionsbestimmungen. Berlin: de Gruyter.
● Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
● Currie, Gregory (2010). Narratives and Narrators. Oxford: Oxford UP.
● Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
● Herman, Luc & Bart Vervaeck ([2001] 2005). Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Lincoln: U
of Nebraska P.
● Jakobson, Roman (1990). “The Speech Event and the Functions of Language.” R. J. On
Language. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 69–79.
● Kania, Andrew (2005) “Against the Ubiquity of Fictional Narrators.” Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 63, 1, 47–54.
● Marcus, Amit (2008). “A Contextual View of Narrative Fiction in the First Person Plural.”
Narrative 16, 46–64.
● Margolin, Uri (2011). “Necessarily a Narrator or Narrator if Necessary: A Short Note on a
Long Subject.” Journal of Literary Semantics 40, 43–57.
● Nünning, Ansgar, ed. (1998). Unreliable Narration. Trier: WVT.
● Patron, Sylvie (2009). Le Narrateur. Introduction à la théorie du récit. Paris: Armand
Colin.
● Patron, Sylvie (2012) “Reply.” Peer Bundgard et al. (eds.) Narrative Theories and
Poetics: 5 Questions. Automatic Press, 159–69.
● Phelan, James (2001). “Why Narrators Can be Focalizers—and Why it Matters.” W. van
Peer & S. Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: State U
of New York P, 51–64.
● Tacca, Oscar (1985). Voces de la novela. Madrid: Gredos.
● Wilson, George M. (2007). “Elusive Narrators in Literature and Film.” Philosophical
Studies 135, 73–88.