Questions tagged [narrator]
Questions related to the concept of "narrator" in literature, i.e. the "voice" that appears to speak or tell a story. The narrator can usually not simply be equated with the author. There are various types of narrators, e.g. the omniscient narrator and the unreliable narrator.
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Can specific word choice count as unreliable narration? [closed]
Does specific word choice, such as in metaphors count as unreliable narration?
If, in a story told in the first person, the narrator describes a man as smelling "like a bouquet of roses" as ...
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Why is only "The Special One" written in first-person narration of all the stories in "The Collector of Treasures"?
The 11th of 13 stories in Bessie Head's The Collector of Treasures is "The Special One", which opens like this:
I was a newcomer to the village at that time and teaching at one of the ...
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Point of view in Nella Larsen's Passing
Most of Nella Larsen's Passing is narrated from the third person limited point of view of Irene Redfield. We see people and events as she sees them. Her thoughts and feelings are described, but not ...
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Discrepancy between original (Less) and sequel (Less is Lost) regarding translation of Arthur Less's work
In Andrew Sean Greer's Pulitzer Prize winning Less (2017), the eponymous minor American novelist is nominated for "a prestigioso award for a book recently translated into Italian" (p. 19). ...
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Dostoyevsky's shift from witness to omniscient narrator in *The Devils*
I find it quite surprising from the structural point of view of the novel that in the first part and up to some few sections of the second part of The Devils Dostoyevsky's narrator is fully a witness ...
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Metafictionality in Chapter 11 of David Copperfield?
In Chapter 11 of David Copperfield, the eponymous narrator describes how Mr Micawber, in debtors' prison, draws up a petition for reforming the law around such imprisonment. He and his friend Captain ...
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Why does the narration shift between first-person and third-person in the short story "Tell them not to kill me!"?
In Juan Rulfo's short story "Tell them not to kill me!" (part of the collection The Burning Plain and Other Stories, of which George D. Schade's English translation is freely available to ...
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Were there clues for the astute reader in Eustace Pedler's diary entries?
I've just read Agatha Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit, which is freely/legally available to read online. The story is largely narrated by the main protagonist Anne Beddingfeld, with some chapters ...
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Is there a name for books in which the narrator isn't the protagonist but someone who know them well?
Is there a name for books in which the protagonist is only observed through a secondary character's narrative? Often they are in first-person (and the "I" is not the protagonist but another ...
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Persona of the narrator in Housman's "Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree"
Here's the fifth stanza from the poem "Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree" by A. E. Housman, which revolves around a country lad with guilt-stricken state of mind after murdering his ...
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Is it an error to identify the narrator of "Ozymandias" with the author?
When the poem begins, "I met a traveler...," is the reader being invited to identify that "I" with P. Shelley himself? Would that have been the prevailing reading? Did Shelley ...
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Is there a narrative gap within The Butterfly Effect by James Swallow? [closed]
I'm doing English Literature coursework (AQA exam board English Literature A-level) where we have to read a novel and then find a narrative gap within that novel, and then fill this gap in. I chose ...
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Who speaks in this sentence? Is it the character or the narrator?
Context: Carol is a divorced woman from work that Carlyle (the protagonist) started seeing a few months after his wife had left him and the kids. Carlyle has not been successful in finding a good ...
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Why does the chronology of Smith's The Fraud jump about?
Zadie Smith's The Fraud (New York: Penguin, 2023) is historical fiction about the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth and the Tichborne Case. The story is told largely from the point of view of ...
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Does this passage from Raymond Carver's "Fever" use free indirect speech?
From Raymond Carver's "Fever", collected in Cathedral (1983):
The next morning, when the alarm went off, he wanted to keep his eyes closed and keep on with the dream he was having. ...
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