Narrator

In practice

The narrator is the voice that tells the story. It is not the author, even when it sounds like one. The author chooses who narrates, how much that voice knows and how far the reader should trust it, and each choice changes the story. Nick Carraway telling The Great Gatsby gives a different book from Gatsby telling it himself, and a different one again from an all-knowing voice above them both.

Screenplays usually have no narrator. The camera shows the story, and the audience works out what it means. When a film does use a narrator, it is through voice-over: Red in The Shawshank Redemption, Henry Hill in Goodfellas, the dead Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard. A film narrator works best when the voice adds something the pictures cannot, such as a point of view, an irony or a memory, rather than describing what is already on screen.

The common mistakes are switching narrators or points of view without meaning to, letting a first-person narrator know things they could not know, and using voice-over to explain what the scene should show. Choose the narrator on purpose: ask whose telling makes this story most interesting, and what that teller would leave out.

A narrator who knows more than the scene

The scene alone is a happy wedding. The narrator, an older Rosa looking back, changes it: she knows what the people on screen do not, and two lines of voice-over turn joy into a memory with grief inside it. This is the narrator's real power in film, the gap between what the camera shows and what the voice knows. If the voice-over only said "my father danced at my wedding," it would be telling the audience what they can already see.

What a narrator is

A narrator is the person or voice who tells a story to the reader or audience. Every novel and short story has one, even if the voice never says "I." The narrator decides what to describe, in what order and in whose words, so every sentence the reader sees has passed through them.

The narrator is not the author. Mark Twain wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but Huck narrates it, with Huck's grammar, beliefs and blind spots. Even a neutral third-person voice is a character the author built, with its own tone and its own decisions about what to reveal. Readers who confuse the two blame authors for their narrators' opinions.

Narration is closely tied to point of view, the angle the story is told from. Point of view describes the grammatical position (first, second or third person) and how much the voice can see. The narrator is who is doing the telling. A third-person limited story, for instance, has a narrator outside the character who still follows that character's thoughts closely.

Types of narrators

A first-person narrator tells the story as "I." They can be the protagonist, like Jane Eyre, or a witness close to the action, like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby or Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. First-person narration is intimate and limited: the reader knows only what the narrator knows, sees, or chooses to say.

A third-person narrator tells the story as "he," "she" or "they." A limited third-person narrator stays close to one character at a time, as in the Harry Potter books. An omniscient narrator knows everything, moving between minds and commenting on events, as in War and Peace or Middlemarch. An objective narrator reports only what could be seen and heard, like a camera.

Second-person narration, telling the story as "you," is rare but memorable, as in Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City. Any of these narrators can also be unreliable, telling the story in a way the reader learns not to trust. A frame narrator tells or passes on a story inside the story, like Lockwood, who hears most of Wuthering Heights from the housekeeper Nelly Dean.

Narrators in film and television

In film, narration usually means voice-over, written in a screenplay as the character's name followed by (V.O.). A character narrator speaks from inside the story, often looking back: Red in The Shawshank Redemption, Scout as an adult in To Kill a Mockingbird, Henry Hill in Goodfellas, who is joined partway through by his wife, Karen.

Some films use an outside narrator who is not a character at all, an omniscient voice that comments with authority or wit. Amélie and The Royal Tenenbaums use one to set a storybook tone. In television, narration can define a whole series: the adult Kevin in The Wonder Years, the gossip columnist in Bridgerton, the dead Mary Alice in Desperate Housewives.

The camera itself has a point of view, even without a voice. Where it is placed, whom it follows and what it withholds act as a kind of narration. Screenwriters shape this through what they put on the page: whose scene this is, what the audience sees first and what they learn only when a character does.

Narrator vs. author and protagonist

The author writes the book; the narrator tells the story inside it. The difference matters most when they disagree. Nabokov did not share the views of Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita, and the novel works because the reader sees through the charming voice to what he is hiding.

The narrator and the protagonist can be the same person, as in The Catcher in the Rye, or different people. A narrator who watches the protagonist, like Nick watching Gatsby, can tell the reader things the hero would never say about himself, and their judgment becomes part of the story. Some novels are told by a minor character or an observer for exactly that reason.

A narrator can also be a different age from the character they once were. An adult narrator describing their childhood, as in To Kill a Mockingbird, creates two voices at once: the child who lived it and the adult who understands it now. The gap between them can carry humor, regret or dramatic irony.

How to choose a narrator

Ask who has the most interesting relationship to the story. The person at the center is the obvious choice, but a witness, a rival or someone looking back years later can make the same events richer. Try the opening page in two or three voices before you commit.

Decide what the narrator knows and keep to it. A first-person narrator cannot describe what happened in a room they were not in, unless someone tells them. An omniscient narrator can, but needs a consistent voice so the reader always knows who is speaking. Most point-of-view errors in manuscripts are a narrator learning something they had no way to learn.

In a screenplay, add a narrator only if the voice adds something the pictures cannot. Good voice-over brings irony, memory, a private opinion or information that would be clumsy to dramatize. If you can cut a line of narration and the scene still says the same thing, cut it.