The Narrator and His/Her/Its Frame-Person Duality: An Analysis in General Narratology
The agency of the narrator is the cornerstone for the building of any narrative. Jonathan Culler rightly observes, “Identifying narrators is one of the primary ways of naturalizing fiction” (p. 299). By “naturalizing” he means understanding the text in co
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The Narrator and His/Her/Its Frame-Person Duality: An Analysis in General Narratology
4.1 The Puzzle of the Narrator The agency of the narrator is the cornerstone for the building of any narrative. Jonathan Culler rightly observes, “Identifying narrators is one of the primary ways of naturalizing fiction” (p. 299). By “naturalizing” he means understanding the text in common sense, that is, retelling (mentally, in most cases) the plot in a straight-forward manner. Furthermore, most narratologists agree that “an inner-textual narrator can in principle be assigned to any narrative text, not just a fictional one” (Sect. 4.2). The narrator being the key figure in originating a full-fledged narrative, to understand the narratorial function is then a reverse process that neutralizes the narration. Narratology during the last century has developed around the issues related to, and complicated by, the narrator’s notorious elusive personality. The narrator’s identification, however, can be a gigantic headache when we have to find him/her/it in so many different types of narratives in human culture. The most embarrassing case is, actually, the most common type of narratives: the so-called “third-person” fictional narratives. We are at a loss where to catch the narrator in some most celebrated novels, Western or Chinese, say, War and Peace, or Romance of Three Kingdoms. When describing the narrator in the novel, Gerard Genette suggests that the narrator should be able to perform five functions: narrating, directing, forming the narrating situation, communication, and attestation (Genette 1980, pp. 255–256). If, according to most narratologists, this narrator in the “third-person” novel is still a narrator, only “implicit”, “covert”, “effaced” or “imperceptible” in the text, though occasionally (but not obligatorily) popping out to offer the so-called “narratorial intrusions”, then how could he perform the five functions ascribed by Genette that have to be sustained constantly throughout the text? At any rate, as Tzvetan Todorov argues, any speaker, when making a self-reference, could only use the first-person pronouns or their substitutions, never the third-person ones (Todorov, p. 121). A “third-person” narrator is only one that seldom or never refers to himself in the text. However to make an completely self-obscured person performing the five functions mentioned above is hardly imaginable. © Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing Co., Ltd 2020 Y. Zhao, The River Fans Out, China Academic Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7724-6_4
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4 The Narrator and His/Her/Its Frame-Person Duality …
That is why some scholars suggest that only the first-person narrator can be called a proper “narrator”, the others (in the second-person or in the third-person) are only the “metonymic” substitutions, that is, reminding readers that there could be a Inarrator behind the text though he does not appear at all. Emile Benveniste observes that there is actually no narrator saying anything in the “third-person” narrati
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