por What is a narrator?
A storyteller is anyone who tells a story or a tale. In literature, it is the voice that tells us the story we are reading, and it can be through one or several characters, or outside of them.
Through the narrator we know what is happening, how and why, and who makes up the story. It is a key element when analyzing texts.
In the oral tradition of almost all peoples there are sacred myths and legends and people who, due to their wisdom and experience, are considered the most apt to narrate these ancient stories to the younger generations. These people are also storytellers.
The narrator in literature
In the specific field of literature, the term narrator can mean two things:
1- An author whose work consists predominantly of texts of the narrative genre. Miguel de Cervantes, for example, is one of the great storytellers in the history of literature.
2- Inside a narrative work, that «voice» that tells us the story and describes the characters.
In this second sense, the narrator is something other than the author. The latter is the flesh and blood person who conceives and writes the story. Instead, the narrator is a linguistic creation of the author with an aesthetic purpose.
The author, who always knows everything about his work, can decide, for example, that the narrator is one of the characters and that the story develops only within the limits of his perspective. What the narrator does not know or cannot see, neither will the reader know or see, although the author does.
The author could also think that the best thing for his work is that the narrator, although he is one character among several, nevertheless possesses a global knowledge of the facts of the story, such as a detective who investigates a case and knows more. about the same as the suspects.
narrator types
The narrator can be of many types, but the main ones are the following:
Omniscient narrator
In theology it is said that God is omniscient, which means that he is everywhere and knows everything.
Likewise, the omniscient narrator knows all the details about the events that occurred and knows everything about his characters: their thoughts, their true intentions or motivations, their feelings, etc.
The omniscient narrator knows almost as much as the author, which is why he is nonetheless a linguistic and aesthetic creation of the latter. It is also expressed in the third person (he/she/they/they).
The omniscient narrator can also be a impersonal witness narrator. It is when it is told from the point of view of a character, although in the third person. Everything that is known of history is known through him or her. The narrator is not a character in the plot.
An example of this type of narrator can be found in the novel Snow (2005), by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk:
The traveler sitting by the window had returned to Istanbul, the city where he had lived his years of childhood and happiness, a week before for the first time after twelve years of absence due to the death of his mother; he had stayed there four days and had left on this unexpected trip to Kars. He felt that the extraordinary beauty of the falling snow brought him more joy than even the sight of Istanbul years later.
Another example, taken from “Todos los fuegos el fuego”, by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar:
This is how his statue will one day be, the proconsul ironically thinks as he raises his arm, fixes it in the gesture of greeting, allowing himself to be petrified by the applause of an audience that two hours of circus and heat have not tired. It is the moment of the promised surprise; The proconsul lowers his arm, looks at his wife who returns the expressionless smile of the holidays.
1st person narrator
This type of narrator tells from himself: I saw, I lived, I did. One of his characteristics is that he is both the narrator and one of the characters.
Unlike the omniscient narrator, he does not know everything, neither about the facts nor about the characters, but only what he has been able to see, experience, have been told or what he has thought.
The first person narrator does not necessarily have to be a person: it can be a dog, a ghost, an angel, etc. That is, any character in the story.
As an example of this type of narrator, we take a fragment of the human comedyby the Venezuelan writer Armando José Sequera.
As a child, I was worried that God was everywhere. It wasn’t remorse I felt, or worry about what he had done or not done. I thought that God kept looking at you all the time, even when he was doing something or when you were naked, and that made me very ashamed.
protagonist narrator
It also tells in the first person, but with the characteristic that he or she is the main actor in the actions that are narrated, either because they undergo them or because they execute them.
This type of narrator is very frequent in testimonial type stories such as in Souvenir from the house of the deadwhere Dostoevsky recalls his years in prison, or The Gulag Archipelagoby Alexander Solzhenitsyn, also a Russian, where he recounts his experience in the Stalinist concentration camps.
The following example belongs to this last book:
The long and winding street of life took us, sometimes with a happy step and other times in a somber wandering, along some fences, fences and more fences, iron fences, walls of cement, brick, adobe or rotten wood. We did not stop to think what could be behind them. We were not trying to look or think the other way.
witness narrator
His story alternates between the first and the third person, because although he tells us objective facts, that is, external to himself, he does so from his personal point of view.
He is the type of narrator that we find in testimonial accounts.
We take the following example from the testimonial book Reverón, voices and demonscompiled by Juan Calzadilla:
I was passing through El Calvario when I saw a young man who was careful in his clothing and was painting. I approached. Within a few minutes we started chatting. His name was Armando Reverón and he studied at the Academy.
narrator functions
1- The narrator is the textual device through which the development of the story is verified.
2- The narrator determines the point of view from which the story will be narrated, be it that of one of the characters, the protagonist or an omniscient point of view.
3 – The narrator establishes the ideological orientation of the text, by making value judgments, comparisons or justifying the decisions of the characters. Or even expose the facts in an «objective» way, and let the reader give the meaning of the text.
References
(s/f). The voice of the story Summary of Figures III Genette. Taken from literarysomnia.com.
(s/f). Narrator types. Taken from rigortextual.com.
Bal, M. (1990). narrative theory. Madrid: Chair.
Greiner Mai, H. (ed.) (2006). Akal Dictionary of General and Comparative Literature. Madrid: Akal Editions.
An editor (2020). The storyteller: who is that guy and what kinds of storytellers are there. Taken from unaeditora.com.