Narrator

The Narrator is the entity within a story that tells the story to the reader. It is one of three entities responsible for story-telling of any kind. The others are the Author and the Reader (or Audience). The Author and the Reader both inhabit the real world. It is the Author's function to create the alternate world, people, and events within the story. It is the Reader's function to understand and interpret the story. The Narrator exists within the world of the story (and only there^) and presents it in a way the Reader can comprehend.

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The concept of the Narrator (as opposed to Author) became more important with the rise of the novel in the 19th Century. Until the late 1800s, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry (including epic poems like The Iliad and Paradise Lost, and poetic drama like Shakespeare). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author. But novels, with their immersive fictional worlds, created a problem, especially when the narrator's views differed significantly from that of the author.

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A good story must have a well-defined and consistent narrator. To this end there are several rules that govern the narrator. It* exists in the world of the story, not in the world of the Reader or the Author. The narrator is a single entity with definite attributes and limitations. The narrator cannot communicate anything it does not encounter. In other words the narrator sees the story from the point it occupies within the fictional world. This is called point of view.

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^ In non-fiction the narrator and the author can share the same persona, since the real world and the world of the story are the same.

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* for clarity and by convention, the Author is referred to as 'he', the Reader is 'she' and the Narrator and the Work are 'it'.

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Author: The word author has several meanings:...

Reader: A reader might be several different things, depending on the context:...

Audience: An audience is a group of people who participate in and experience or encounter a work of art, literature, theatre, music or academics in any medium. Audience members participate in different ways in different kinds of art; some events invite overt audience participation and others allowing only mod...

Narrator related Images and Photos (experimental)

The Narrator