Anyone who tells a story acts as its narrator. Stories can have many different kinds of narrators: some have just one narrator, others several; most narrators tend to be humans, but quite a few of them – especially in children’s literature – can be animals, plants, toys or other supposedly inanimate objects. On top of this, narrators can themselves be active participants in the events they describe or they can be entirely detached from them; they can be ‘omniscient’ in the sense that they appear to know exactly what is happening anywhere and at any point of time – even to the extent of going inside the characters’ heads and telling us what they are thinking – or they can report only what they have seen, heard or conjectured for themselves. Narrators can be reliable or unreliable, partial or impartial; they can make us aware of their presence as people with specific characteristics by (amongst other things) identifying themselves in the first person singular (‘I’) and/or using an emotionally-engaged language to recount the events they narrate, or they can conceal themselves by retelling those events in the third-person (‘It was a cold rainy night when Veronica’s car broke down in the middle of nowhere’) and/or using a language that appears to be entirely objective and neutral.
Narrators, in short, can be of many different kinds and they can tell their stories in a variety of different ways. They are important because they are one of the principal channels through which a narrative establishes the range and quality of the points of view it offers on the story it tells. It is essential, then, that we identify the kind of narrator the narrative we are analysing possesses and that we use what we discover about this narrator and about how she, he or they tell their story to influence our understanding of what the narratives says and does.
You can find a checklist of questions to ask of the narrator(s) of the narrative you are studying – along with some of the key technical terms narratologists use to talk about their various characteristics – here.
Next: Focalizers