One Man's Notion

Who tells you the tale?

Here, Bardelys must be left to his own devices for a day. Asotir has seen something that so astounded him that he must speak out about it, with your indulgence.

I was helping Bardelys frame his thoughts yesterday, when we both looked online via Google for any ‘standard’ definitions of ‘immersive fiction’ (which turns out to be a term more often used in gaming than in fiction, which surprised both Bardelys and me), when we found a reference in Wikipedia. Of course we opened that page with some interest, where we found the following:

“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. It is the author's function to create the alternate world, people, and events within the story. It is the reader’s function to understand and interpret the story. The narrator exists within the world of the story…”
— from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrator

Longtime followers of the Asotirica blog will understand immediately our shock – our distress, even.

I don’t know if this opinion here expressed on Wikipedia is standard literary critical opinion or not. I taught myself talesmanship, by reading and telling tales in many different media. Therefore it is quite possible that my own notions are far from mainstream.

Therefore I can only stress that the opinions I offer you here are my own idiosyncratic ones, and not perhaps representative of established authority.

In my opinion, then, the ‘narrator’ of a tale is the one who tells the story to you. This is of course, and by necessity, the author. It is the author who tells us, or narrates, the tale.

At times the author may choose to hide behind the mask of one or more of the characters he has invented to populate the tale. He may have one of several reasons for this bit of subterfuge; no matter, it is his choice, and ours as audience to decide whether such a choice adds to or detracts from our enjoyment of the tale.

‘There can be only one,’ as the writer of Highlander tells us. Only the author can narrate his own tale. The only exception I can imagine is where the author serves the function more of editor than author. Say I find an old manuscript, a bundle of letters written by a man, expressing a wonderful outlook on a vanished time. So I present this manuscript, interspersing it with comments of my own. The narrator here might be the author (myself) or the author of the manuscript (the man who wrote the letters). But this case is rare.

To say, as the author of the Wikipedia article does, that the narrator is an entity within a story that tells the story to the reader is to posit a sort of autonomy to a literary character – a very odd sort of view, as though any character could interact with the reader at all, in any way. For (of course) every single thing this story-world ‘narrator’ claims to say, is in fact said by the author, who puts the words in his mouth.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, August 24, 2008)