New Views on the Typology of the Narrator

Abstract

The first theoretical typology of the narrator was conducted by F. K. Stanzel (1955). It was critically responded to by W. Kayser and W. C. Booth. They believed its main flaw was the placement of the auctorial and personal narrator on the same level as the first-person narrator. By dividing them it is possible to create two different typological models: one with the first, second and third person narrators, and another with an auctorial, personal and virtual narrator. The third possible set consists of the lyrical, dramatic and epic narrator. The three typological models are placed on different levels, but just as they can be connected with one another, they can also exclude each other. The narrator in the first set is characterized by a speaking character: the first and third person have been used ever since the beginnings of narration, while the second person narrator becomes more expressed in the prose of the 20^th century. In spite of this, such a typology needs to be taken as a-historical, since the first and third person can quite often be replaced by each other, or both can even be replaced by the second person narrator. The opposite of this model, which is determined by the grammatical structure of language, is the threesome of auctorial, personal and virtual narrator. It is placed on a higher, epistemological level; each of them personalizes a special relation to “truth” and reality in a narrated text. The auctorial narrator understands the action from the point of a solid, metaphysical, social and moral “truth”; the personal narrator places the “truth” in parentheses, it bases narrative on the reality of personal experience and the reliability of personal consciousness; the virtual narrator simulates both stands as an appearance, fiction and play. This typology is historical and its types correspond to the developmental stages of narrative, to the auctorial and traditional, to the personal and modern, and to the virtual and post-modern. On the other hand, the trio of lyrical, dramatic and epic narrator is a-historical. Generally, the narrator in all periods can come close to lyrical speaker (in diaries, in epistolary and monologue narrative) or to a dramatic speaker (in epistolary and dialogue narrative, and in monologue varieties), or it can encompass all three layers of reality, accessible to epic narrative: this kind of epic narrator is frequently used in epics and novels from Homer to Thomas Mann and others.