The Narrator
or WHO ARE YOU? AND WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS?
A crucial element of any work of fiction is the NARRATOR, the person who is telling the story (note that this isn't the same as the AUTHOR, the person who actually wrote the story).
What types of narrators are there? The first major distinction critics make about narrators is by person:
a FIRST PERSON narrator is an "I" (occasionally a "we") who speaks from her/his subject position. That narrator is usually a character in the story, who interacts with other characters; we see those interactions through the narrator's eyes, and we can't know anything the narrator doesn't know.
a SECOND PERSON narrator speaks in "you." This is an extremely rare case in American literature, although we will read a few examples.
a THIRD PERSON narrator is not a figure in the story, but an "observer" who is outside the action being described. A third-person narrator might be omniscient (ie, able to tell what all the characters are thinking), but that is not always the case. Third-person narration may also be focalized through a particular character, meaning that the narrator tells us how that character sees the world, but can't, or at least doesn't, read the mind of all the characters this way
