Narratorial frame–person duality: an analysis in general narratology

Abstract

Abstract There can be no narrative text without a narrator. Locating the source of narration is the starting point for an understanding of any narrative. There is no agreement among narratologists, nevertheless, on how the narrator could be located in a narrative text, in a so-called “third-person” fictional narrative, for instance, or in dramatic or cinematic narratives. The narrator should be ubiquitous in theory, yet is extremely elusive in practice. That is why there has hardly been any effort among scholars to offer a description of the general shape of the narrator. The present paper attempts to divide all narratives into a few categories in terms of narratorial transfiguration so as to reveal the narrator’s various shapes, from a fully individuated flesh-and-blood person to a fictionalized character, to an almost totally depersonalized frame. The narrator, however, consistently functions as the source of the narrative discourse, sliding in a frame–person scalar duality, but always integrating both. The narrator’s duality provides the key to a general narratology.