Narrative Voices and Perspectives in Storytelling

Posted on Feb 3, 2025 in English

Narrator Types

Within the Story

  • Character identifiable within it
  • It will use first-person pronouns
    • I
    • We
  • Potential
    • To be the protagonist of the story
      • Player first-person narrator
    • Being a minor character in the story. A witness to the events
      • Witness first-person narrator

Out of History

  • Mainly uses the third-person pronouns (he, she, they, them)
  • There is a character who acts in the narrative
  • Potential
    • Omniscient third-person narrator
      • Knows what the characters think and feel
    • Third-person observer narrator
      • Accounts only for what is seen and heard
      • Notes and works like a camera that will focus on every scene

Gerard Genette

Diegesis

  • Space-time within which the story unfolds, proposed by the fiction of the story
  • Narrated world
  • Difference
    • History: What happened
    • Story: Way to tell what happened

Announcers

  • Extradiegetic
    • Accounts for the main level of the story
    • Is the first narrator outside the diegesis or narrative world
  • Intradiegetic
    • Acts within the main level of the story
    • Introduces a second narrative included in the primary
  • Heterodiegetic
    • Tells the story of others, is in the third person
  • Homodiegetic
    • Tells its own story
    • Is a first-person narrator
    • Can be a protagonist or secondary character in the story
  • Autodiegetic
    • Is a hero of the story it tells
    • It is similar to homodiegetic
    • The narrator is his own story; he is the center and source of the story

Tzvetan Todorov

Aspects of the Story

  • Type of “look” that is established between the character and the narrator

Types of Narrator

  • Narrator > character or vision behind
    • The narrator knows more than the character and does not explain where he gets his information
    • The narrator can tell what none of the characters know
    • The narrator can tell from the knowledge of one or more characters
  • Narrator = character (or vision “with”)
    • May be told in the first or third person, but always from the vision that the same character has
    • The narrator cannot explain anything until the person has not lived it
  • Narrator < character (or vision “from outside”)
    • The narrator has no access to the conscience of any character
    • Relates what is seen and heard

Contemporary Narrative Texts

Some contemporary narrative texts use second-person pronouns as a basis: the narrator’s voice speaks directly to the character, telling what he does or what he will do.

Multiperspectivism

  • Changes of narrative voice or seeing the same event or the same character from different perspectives, not always consistent but divergent

People

First

  • Transmitter
  • Voice narrator
  • It can never be second person

Second

  • Receiver

Third

  • No person
  • Is out of communication (Benveniste)