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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.
Who is the narrator? Today most literary critics are happy to regard the narrator as an inherent feature of narrative, although the coherence of any distinct concept of such a narrating agent remains debatable, to say the least.' In calling the narrator into question, I want also to question the broad assumptions that have sustained the concept in critical practice. I do not think of the concept as a purely narratological matter, but one that has large consequences for our understanding of fiction. Indeed, the narrator's promotion from representational accidence to structural essence has occurred specifically in response to the qualities of fiction, not narrative per se; and the concept has only been put to the most cursory use outside the fictional context because the narrator, thus understood, functions primarily to establish a representational frame within which the narrative discourse may be read as report rather than invention? In other words, it defines the extent to which we can set aside our knowledge...