"Narrator" by Sarah Strassel

Of all the literary terminology we encounter, the narrator functions in a decidedly novelistic manner. Indeed, one may argue that the narrator plays the single most important role among all the literary devices a novelist may employ. Correspondingly, variations in narrative styles facilitate plot movement (or stagnation), enable character development, provide contextual background, determine a novel’s pace and tone, and effectively provide a vehicle through which an author shapes his or her texts into a cohesive work of fiction. Moreover, narrators function as the liaison between author and reader—thus, the thematic significance a novel conveys relies on the strength of this mediating textual voice.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines a narrator as “one who tells, or is assumed to be telling, the story in a given narrative,” that is, “the imagined ‘voice’ transmitting the story” (“Narrator”). This “teller,” however, has an entirely rhetorical function, as the OD differentiates the narrator and the “author,” who may have created other fictions with other narrators, and from the “implied author,” who, though not responsible for recounting the story, assumes responsibility for “selecting it and inventing a narrator for it” (“Narrator”). The depth of a narrator’s involvement in the text varies and determines the point of view from which she tells the story. A “first-person narrator” plays a definitive role in the text, as either a character or a witness to the actions he relates, while a “third-person narrator” stands “outside” the events in the story. Furthermore, the level of a narrator’s “omniscience” determines his “access” to “special privileges […] such as access to characters’ unspoken thoughts, and knowledge of events happening simultaneously in different places” (“Narrator”).

The OD also cites the degree to which an author develops his narrator, for while first-person narratives often possess “noticeable characteristics and personalities” that establish them as “intrusive narrators,” a “covert narrator,” common in third-person narratives, may exist as “no more than a ‘voice’” (“Narrator”). In assessing a narrator’s relationship to the overall message the text conveys, one must also consider his reliability, for an “unreliable” narrator may generate a “partial, ill-informed, or otherwise misleading” account, especially if, as most first-person narrators, he is intimately involved with the plotline.

Works Cited:

"Narrator." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Ed. Christopher Baldick. Oxford UP, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. Washington and Lee University. 20 February 2006 .