53 The narrator in a literary text. Types of narrators with regard to the author and with regard to the textual world.

A narrator is an entity within a story that tells the story to the reader. It is one of three entities responsible for story-telling of any kind. The others are the author and the reader (or audience). The author and the reader both inhabit the real world. The narrator exists within the world of the story and presents it in a way the reader can comprehend.

The concept of the unreliable narrator (as opposed to Author) became more important with the rise of the novel in the 19th Century.

In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction) is a literary device in which the credibility of the narrator is seriously compromised. This unreliability can be due to psychological instability, a powerful bias, a lack of knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader or audience. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, but third-person narrators can also be unreliable.

The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to his unreliability. In many cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving the reader to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.

Until the late 1800s, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt with poetry (including epic poems like The Iliad and Paradise Lost, and poetic drama like Shakespeare). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author. But novels, with their immersive fictional worlds, created a problem, especially when the narrator's views differed significantly from that of the author.

Types of Narrators:

First-person narrative is a literary technique in which the story is narrated by one character, who explicitly refers to him or herself in the first person, that is, using words and phrases involving "I" and "we".

First-person plural narrators tell the story using "we", that is, no individual speaker is identified; the narrator is a member of a group that acts as a unit. The first-person-plural point of view occurs rarely but can be used effectively, sometimes as a means to increase the concentration on the character or characters the story is about.

(rarely) second-person narrative, in which the protagonist is referred to in the second person, as "you".

The third-person narrative is narration in the third person. The participants in the narrative are understood to be distinct from the person telling the story and the person to whom, or by whom, it is read.

The third-person limited omniscient is a narrative mode. In this mode, the reader and writer observe the situation from the outside through the senses and thoughts of every character equally and without bias, although that focal character(is the character around whom the events of the story revolve.) may shift throughout the course of any given narrative.