Why do we accept a narrative discourse ascribed to a “third-person narrator” as true? The classical, and a cognitive approach

Abstract

AbstractThe aim of the present paper is to discuss the question of why readers accept a literary narrative discourse attributed traditionally to an “omniscient third-person narrator” unconditionally as true. I will advocate two theses. First, that this characteristic of narrative comprehension is a consequence of a grammatical feature of the narrative discourse, namely, the absence of the “narrating-I.” This format mimics what Cosmides and Tooby label as scope-free representation, i.e., a representation that is not bound by scope-operators and thus treated by a cognitive architecture as architecturally true. Second, narrative discourse ascribed traditionally to a third person narrator should be understood as the linguistic representation of the true states of affairs of a narrative world.