![]() In terms of communication theory, any act of communication consists of a sender sending a message to a receiver. If narrative is a report of acts and events, we need a reporter behind it, and if it is a tale, we need a teller. For a claim to be made, there needs to be an agent who makes this claim, hence the narrator. In terms of linguistic pragmatics or speech act theory, any narrative, regardless of its length, is a macro speech act of the constative type, claiming that such and such happened. A narrator can thus be defined as the sujet de l’énonciation of one or more utterances that represents an event (Coste 1989: 166). For narrative, the terms thus translate into narration, narrated event, narrator and narrated agent(s), respectively. Since narrative utterances are a subset of the universe of utterances, they too must therefore contain a sayer. In Benveniste’s ( 1966) and Jakobson’s ( 1971) text linguistics, any utterance is described as consisting of two indissoluble components: the speech event ( énonciation, saying) and that which is said ( énoncé) to which correspond, respectively, the sayer ( sujet de l’énonciation) and the one spoken of ( sujet de l’énoncé). Good reasons, stemming from text linguistics, philosophy, narratology and common sense, can be adduced for the necessity or at least advisability of granting the narrator category as defined above a central place in the description and interpretation, both informal and professional, of literary narratives. The linguistically projected narrator and the actual world producer will be confronted at a later stage (3.6). An inner-textual narrator can in principle be assigned to any narrative text, not just a fictional one, and such ascription does not require any knowledge about the actual world producer of the words of the text, be it a human being or a computer program. ![]() as highest-level center of the discourse. The position occupied by this presumed inner-textual originator of the discourse functions as a logico-linguistic center for all spatio-temporal and personal references occurring in the discourse, i.e. Terms designating this role include discursive function or role, voice, source of narrative transmission, producer of current discourse, teller, reporter, narrating agent or instance. ExplicationĪ narrator is a linguistically indicated, textually projected and readerly constructed function, slot or category whose occupant need not be thought of in any terms but those of a communicative role. Through a dual process of metonymic transfer and anthropomorphization, the term narrator is then employed to designate a presumed textually projected occupant of this position, the hypothesized producer of the current discourse, the individual agent who serves as the answer to Genette’s question qui parle? The narrator, which is a strictly textual category, should be clearly distinguished from the author (Schönert → Author) who is of course an actual person. In the literal sense, the term “narrator” designates the inner-textual (textually encoded) highest-level speech position from which the current narrative discourse as a whole originates and from which references to the entities, actions and events that this discourse is about are being made.
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