narrator

narrator, one who tells a story. In a work of fiction the narrator determines the story’s point of view. If the narrator is a full participant in the story’s action, the narrative is said to be in the first person. A story told by a narrator who is not a character in the story is a third-person narrative.

A work may have more than one narrator, as in an epistolary novel such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, which consists of letters by a variety of characters. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, one character tells part of the story and then introduces another who continues it or provides another perspective on events.

Narrators are sometimes categorized by the way in which they present their story. An intrusive narrator, a common device in many 18th- and 19th-century works, is one who interrupts the story to provide a commentary to the reader on some aspect of the story or on a more general topic. An unreliable narrator is one who does not understand the full import of a situation or one who makes incorrect conclusions and assumptions about events witnessed; this type is exemplified by the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. A related device is the naive narrator, who does not have the sophistication to understand the full import of the story’s events, though the reader understands. Such narrators are often children, as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The protagonist of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is the paradigm of the self-conscious narrator, who calls attention to the text as fiction.