Narrator

Narrator and author

The narrator is to be distinguished from the author. Whereas the author is the natural person - the individual of the real-world - which with the responsibility for the creation of work, the narrator is only the individual - reality or fiction - which is conceived by the reader like person in charge of a speech. The narrator is the person who says to it “I” principal account. For example, the narrator of the Last day of one condemned , is not Victor Hugo, although this novel is written with the first nobody.

Relations of the narrator to the account

Following Gerard Genette in Figures III , one distinguishes often various types of narrators according to their relation with the told history. Two oppositions with this intention are used:

Extradiégétique/Intradiégétique . The narrator extradiegetic is a narrator of first level (it is the case of Homère telling the adventures of Ulysses, or of the narrator, fiction this time, of the Dernier day of one condemned ). The narrator intradiegetic on the other hand is a “told individual”. It is typically a character of account which starts to tell an enchased account. The Schéhérazade of the Thousand and One Nights is a traditional example.
Hétérodiégétique/Homodiégétique . What is aimed here, it is the membership of the narrator in the world of the account which he tells. Schéhérézade never appears in the distribution of the accounts which it makes, and so it is a heterodiegetic narrator. On the contrary, Ulysses tells several times during the Odyssée his former tribulations, in the form of accounts where it has the first role of course. He is then narrator homodiegetic. The narrator is homodiegetic when it is present as character in the history which it tells. In this case, if he is not a simple witness of the events, but the hero of its account, he can also be called narrator autodiegetic. On the other hand, the narrator heterodiegetic is absent as character of the history which he tells, even if he can make intrusions there - as narrator.

These two oppositions make it possible to specify the grammatical concept of anybody, a little fuzzy when it is applied to the account: very speech implies necessarily a speaker, i.e. an individual who assumes the role of “I”, when well even the word “I” would not be used in the text of the account. From this point of view, any account, because it is really before a whole speech, would be of course with the first nobody.