What is the difference between an author and a narrator? Quite simply, the author is the historical ‘real life’ person who writes the narrative, whereas the narrator is the fictional person who tells the story. These two roles are very different from one another and should never be confused. When we come to interpret a narrative, it is crucial we seek to identify the character, the outlook and the storytelling techniques of the narrator and that we then use this information to help explain the kind of narrative she or he produces. While it can at times be helpful to know something about the personality, life experiences and beliefs of the historical author, this is useful only in as far at it helps provide us with some historical context for the events and in some cases the literary style of the narrative. Knowing about the real-life author is rather like knowing how farm work was carried out in the days of Thomas Hardy, what people in general thought about whales and whaling during the period Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick or why modernist writers used stream of consciousness to express the inner lives of their characters. Knowledge about an author may help you understand something of the world in which a narrative takes place, that is, or about its general literary style, but it will not tell you anything important about why this particular narrative takes the particular form it does or why it tells this particular story in this particular way and endows it with this particular set of meanings.
For these reasons, you should never use what you know (or think you know) about an author in order to decide what a narrative means or why it is told in the way it is. The novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, can be read either as a deeply offensive book which perpetuates the racial prejudices of its day through its presentation of the black slave Jim, or it can be seen as a paean to freedom, in which the innocent outlook of its narrator Huck enables us to see the absurdity of the artificial distinctions between white people and black people which American society enforced at the time the story is set. Both readings are equally valid and can only be justified by grounding one’s understanding of what one thinks the novel says in one’s perception of how it says it. A reading of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that claims “this book says X about slavery because that is what Mark Twain thought about slavery” is not a literary analysis at all; it is instead a statement thattreats the book only as propaganda and not as a narrative.
You would do well, therefore, to bear in mind the English writer D. H. Lawrence’s dictum:
“Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
(By “teller” Lawrence means here “the author”).
If you would like to read more about the distinction between authors and narrators – including a further explanation for why they can never ultimately be the same person even in explicitly autobiographical narratives – click here.
Some critics are very uncomfortable with this suggestion that we can cut off the umbilical cord between a text and its author in quite so decisive a fashion. They therefore propose that we retain some kind of connection in the form of the notion of an ‘implied author‘ instead. If you also share those concerns, you might like to click on that link too.
Next: Narrators