You are on page 1of 1

An Inventory of Narrators

Term Author/Writer

Meaning and Synonyms Apparently, self-evident;

Implied author An author who uses the word I in a narrative often seems different from the writer (- the person who may be described on the dust jacket); even in fiction lacking reference to an authorial I, we may form a conception of the author based on the style and the manner of telling; most critics accept W. C. Booths suggestion that whether overt or covert, we should refer to this persona as the implied author; Authorial An implied author who refers to himself as I, tells a fictional story Narrator in which he does not appear, although personal knowledge of the characters may be implied; using the Greek for same and different homo, hetero , respectively ,outside and inside extra and intra G. Genette refers to the authorial narrative as extradiegetic and hetro-diegetic outside narrator different from the character; III person Narrator The writer refers to all characters in the III-rd person; it can include authorial narration, but it usually refers to a figure in which there is no reference to the I who writes; In the latter sense it is also called figural narration(Stanzel); I-st person Narrator The narrator-writer is also a character in the story, who may tell his own story (I as protagonist G Genettes extradiegetic homodiegetic or someone elses I as witness, or Ich-Erzahlung);

Implied author vs narrator If an authorial narrator recounts a story, there is no apparent difference between the implied author and the narrator; in the III-rd person/figural narration, since there is no reference to an I who writes, there is no linguistic way to distinguish the implied author from the narrator; in the I-st person fiction, the narrator is usually different in obvious ways from the person who did the writing; some critics claim they can discern an implied author behind the I-st person narrator despite the lack of linguistic signs of differentiating the 2;

Embedded Narrat-or/-ion A story told by a character in a story is embedded; some critics refer to it as metan-arration or hypo-narration; Voice (G. Genette) the act of narrating the situation involving a teller and an audience -; more narrowly defined, it answers the question Who speaks?; in American criticism, voice often refers to the unique qualities in an authors works;

You might also like