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 non-communicational theories of 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 non-communicational or poetic theories of the fictional narrative in particular. Do all fictional narratives have a narrator, or only some of them? Can narratives thus be "narrator-less"? This question divides communicational theories (based on the communication between real or fictional narrator and narratee) and non-communicational or poetic theories (which aim to rehabilitate the function of the author as the creator of the fictional narrative). 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.
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