Narrator Essay Research Paper What is narrator

Narrator Essay, Research Paper

What is narrator? Narrator is the voice the author creates to tell the story. The possible ways of telling a story are many, and more than one way can be worked into a single story. Conventionally, the various narrators that storytellers draw upon can be grouped into four broad groups: the third-person narrator, the first-person narrator, the omniscient narrator and the witness narrator. After reading William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily” ,Edora Welty’s “A Worn Path”, Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Was Almost A Man” and Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”, I want to discuss what type of the narrative voice the four writers create in their own stories.

A witness narrator is who tells only what they see or hear through their perspectives. For example, in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” which is about an insane woman who kills her man and sleeps with the dead man for ten years, I can find that there is an example of witness narrator. The author, William Faulkner, uses the Jefferson town people as witness to create the town’s view about Emily. After the town noticed there was a stinky smell from Miss Grierson house , they asked Judge Stevens to “send her word to stop it”( Faulkner,337). The town people discussed about the stinky smell from Emily ’s house, they were the observers.

A first-person narrator is when the narrator speaks using “I” or “We” pronouns. We can see such first-person narrator in both “A Rose For Emily” and ” The Man Who Was Almost A Man”. Faulkner uses the town people as observers in “A Rose For Emily” but his we, though plural and representative if the town’s view of Emily, is definitely a first-person narrator. Just as in the article where it says “We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father driven away, and we knew?”(338).