Who Is the Narrator?

Abstract

"Who Is the Narrator?" calls into question the concept of the narrator as a distinct and inherent agent of fictional narrative. The effect of this concept has been, misleadingly, to frame and contain fictionality. The argument addresses Genette's typology of narrators, first comparing the extradiegetic homodiegetic category with the intradiegetic categories in order to establish that all these narrators are equally represented, and are therefore characters. It then confronts the extradiegetic heterodiegetic case, examining the implications of omniscience and external focalization and dismissing the claim that distinct narrators are needed in such cases so that the fictional information may be presented as known rather than imagined. The issue of the author's accountability for fictional statements is addressed with reference to speech act theory to show that the conventional "pretense" model of fiction is unsatisfactory and that an acceptable speech act account would not postulate a narrator. The narrator is therefore shown to be either a character or the author. Some possible objections to this position are then considered: The implications of unreliability, ideas about local and covert narrators, and the issue of the implied author are taken into account. In conclusion, some of the argument's consequences for an understanding of fiction in rhetorical rather than representational terms are briefly indicated.