The Narrator: A Problem in Narrative Theory

The narrator (the answer to the question ＂who speaks in the text?＂) is a commonly used notion in teaching literature and in literary criticism, even though it is the object of an ongoing debate in narrative theory. Do all fictional narratives have a narrator, or only some of them? Can narratives thus be ＂narratorless＂? This question divides communicational theories (based on the communication between real or fictional narrator and narratee) and noncommunicational or poetic theories (which aim to rehabilitate the function of the author as the creator of the fictional narrative).

Clarifying the notion of the narrator requires a historical and epistemological approach focused on the opposition between communicational theories of narrative in general and noncommunicational or poetic theories of the fictional narrative in particular. The Narrator offers an original and critical synthesis of the problem of the narrator in the work of narratologists and other theoreticians of narrative communication from the French, Czech, German, and American traditions and in representations of the noncommunicational theories of fictional narrative. Sylvie Patron provides linguistic and pragmatic tools for interrogating the concept of the narrator based on the idea that fictional narrative has the power to signal, by specific linguistic marks, that the reader must construct a narrator; when these marks are missing, the reader is able to perceive other forms and other narrative effects, specially sought after by certain authors.

Sylvie Patron is a senior lecturer and research supervisor at Université Paris Cité. She is the author or editor of several books on narrative theory, including Optional-Narrator Theory: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals (Nebraska, 2021). Catherine Porter is a visiting scholar in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. She has translated more than forty books and is the coeditor of A Companion to Translation Studies.