Need there be implicit narrators of literary fictions?

Abstract

The question of whether there are fictional narrators who are not characters within fiction films has become a hotly contested issue in the philosophy of film, in part because of the careful and exacting work of George Wilson. In his book, Narration in Light, Wilson paid careful attention to the precise manner in which the narratives or stories of fiction films were narrated or told (Wilson 1986). In that book, Wilson was skeptical about the existence of cinematic narrators whose existence was merely implicit. He didn't think that it made sense to see the pictures and sounds of the film as the product of a narrator unless the narrator was explicitly figured in the film, as when Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) narrates the events that form the bulk of Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944). In "Elusive Narrators in Literature and Film," Wilson outlines a theory of implicit narration in both film and literature that departs from his earlier view (Wilson 2007). Non-explicit narrators of fictional works now seem pretty widespread to Wilson, though he won't go as far as claiming that they are ubiquitous. In regard to film, Wilson is still somewhat tentative about claiming the presence of implicit narrators of their fictions, though he is clear that he now believes that it at least makes sense to claim there are implicit narrators of fiction films. But despite occasional forays into film, the majority of Wilson's essay is taken up with a defense of claim that a wide range of literary fictions have implicit narrators. Although I am very interested in the question of whether fiction films have implicit narrators, I will restrict my remarks to the issue of whether literary fictions can have merely implicit narrators. I do so because this is the claim that Wilson defends at length and quite explicitly in this paper. I will have to reserve a discussion of cinematic narrators to a later date. In his essay, Wilson joins an already well-articulated debate on the existence of implicit narrators of literary fictions. The advocates for such shadowy beings