Literary communication: Effects of reader-narrator cooperation

Abstract

We propose that readers process text as if they were communicating with the narrator. This entails, first of all, that readers construct a mental representation of the narrator's knowledge, perspective, and goals, and second, that they cooperate with the narrator by interpreting the characters and events of the described world in a way that makes the narrator's stance rational and justified. It is hypothesized that both of these processes depend on the location that is assigned to the narrator in the described world. We present a model of how the narrator's location is constrained by dialogue style and how the assigned location affects the evaluation of the characters and the perceived attributes of the narrator. The model was tested by systematically manipulating dialogue style in the story ‘Rope’ by Katherine Ann Porter. Readers' evaluations of the characters and inferences about the narrator closely matched the predictions of the model.