The narrator in a literary text. Types of narrators with regard to the author and with regard to the textual world.

A narrator is an entity within a story that tells the story to the reader. It is one of three entities responsible for story-telling of any kind. The others are the author and the reader (or audience). The author and the reader both inhabit the real world. The narrator exists within the world of the story and presents it in a way the reader can comprehend.

The concept of the unreliable narrator (as opposed to Author) became more important with the rise of the novel in the 19th Century.

In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction) is a literary device in which the credibility of the narrator is seriously compromised. This unreliability can be due to psychological instability, a powerful bias, a lack of knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader or audience. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, but third-person narrators can also be unreliable.

The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to his unreliability. In many cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving the reader to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.

Until the late 1800s, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt with poetry (including epic poems like The Iliad and Paradise Lost, and poetic drama like Shakespeare). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author. But novels, with their immersive fictional worlds, created a problem, especially when the narrator's views differed significantly from that of the author.

Types of Narrators:

First-person narrative is a literary technique in which the story is narrated by one character, who explicitly refers to him or herself in the first person, that is, using words and phrases involving "I" and "we".

First-person plural narrators tell the story using "we", that is, no individual speaker is identified; the narrator is a member of a group that acts as a unit. The first-person-plural point of view occurs rarely but can be used effectively, sometimes as a means to increase the concentration on the character or characters the story is about.

(rarely) second-person narrative, in which the protagonist is referred to in the second person, as " you ".

The third-person narrative is narration in the third person. The participants in the narrative are understood to be distinct from the person telling the story and the person to whom, or by whom, it is read.

The third-person limited omniscient is a narrativemode. In this mode, the reader and writer observe the situation from the outside through the senses and thoughts of every character equally and without bias, although that focal character (is the character around whom the events of the story revolve.) may shift throughout the course of any given narrative.

54. The degree of the narrator’s presence in a literary text (degree of perceptability).

This ranges from maximum of covertness to maximum of overtness. The maximum of covertness is often mistaken for a complete absence of the narrator.

Signs of perceptibility:

11) Description of setting (sig of a narrator presence) (what should be told in details)

12) Identification(definition) of characters (the author identify the character to the reader: handsome, ugly, clever, rich. … (the narrator’s knowledge about him0

13) Temporal summary: presupposes a desire to account for time passage,to satisfy. Questions about what has happened.

14) Definition of character -also suggests an abstraction generalization on summing up the part of the narrator as well.

- a desire to identify authoritative characterization

15) Report of what characters do not think or say.

16) Commentary can be on the story or on the narration

Interpretation - provide information about interpret;

Judgement - narrator’s moral

Generalization- - extends the significance of the particular case. Unlike interpretation, judgement and generalization are concerned with the represented world, but problems of representing.

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