Writing Who is the Narrator in Your Fiction?

[Eldoria]

Who is the Narrator in Your Fiction?
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Narrator is the 'unseen voice' who conveys the story to the reader/viewer through narration.

An illustration of the relationship between the reader, narrator and story can be described as follows:

Reader <- Narrator -> Story​

In fiction, the narrator's position is usually relative depending on the POV, for example:

The narrator is positioned as "I am" in the first POV which provides subjective imagery based on the experiences of the character "I".

Meanwhile, in omniscient third POV , the narrator is positioned as a 'god' who knows everything that happens in the story world, whether past, present, or future.

In limited/ objective third POV, the narrator can also act as a narrative camera that follows one or several characters in scenes.

The narrator is a medium between the reader and the story. Without the narrator, the reader would not be able to enter the story world.

In short, the narrator can be anyone in a story, whether a character, a god, or a camera. My questions are,

1. Who is the narrator in your story?
2. What is the narrator's position in your story?
3. What does the narrator mean to you as an author?
4. What is the relationship between the narrator and the reader in your story?

 

[Lmae]

Altered One: The camera

 

[Jerynboe]

The central assumed conceit is that the story is being told by my MC after the fact, so everything is in past tense. Segments from his POV are in first person, but everyone else’s pov chapters are in third person limited and heavily flavored by their ways of thinking so it’s functionally the camera option.

 

[Rzzy]

My protagonist uses first-person POV so that readers can feel more emotionally connected to her personal view of the brutal war. Stylistically, it is meant to read like a war veteran's memoir.

However, I also plan to include bird's-eye POV sections. These will explain parts of the battlefield that my protagonist is not directly involved in.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

It varies.

Kelly (Strange Awakening) is pretty much telling the reader what happened, kind of live, kind of past tense.

Jack Diamond (Diamond in the Rough, Blood Diamond) narrates stories that happened in his past.

True Blue is ... complicated. There is a framing narrative with the child of the superhero Indigo narrating "in between" segments, and then "dear old dad" telling what really happened from his POV - his stories are set about "20 years ago" while the "between segments" narrator is speaking in the present.

In my story on Honeyfeed, there is a narrator who steps out of the story to address the reader a few times, but mostly just tells what happens. This is actually a character in the story, and the reader would not be too far off to suspect it is Nick's System (if I ever go back and write part two, it will be revealed as something else entirely).

Over on Pocket FM, Dane Coleman's adventures are literally being narrated by a female narrator accidentally selected, but she does seem to fit so I won't try to change her.
Between Earth and Pyrroth has a male narrator I don't particularly like (he seemed to fit well in the sample paragraph but knd of sucks outside of action or pure atmospheric scenes - shines in those, but a story needs its "soft moments" too!