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what the friggin' frig is a narrator???

By Anonymous

I’m going to be absolutely 100% honest with y’all. I have no idea how to answer this question. When I first saw the blog prompt (and before I did the readings) I thought that I had the perfect answer: me. My pre-reading train of thought was that narrator and storyteller would be interchangeable definitions here. Who else could be my favorite narrator besides myself? I enjoy the stories I tell the most, because I also participated in them, so it makes sense that I would come to this conclusion. However, this was naive, pre-reading Nicole and we now know that’s probably not the best answer now.

The problem is that I don’t know what the/an actual answer to this question would be if I were to structure it around the definition provided in the handbook. There’s one part of their definition that really threw me for a loop and is making this particularly hard. The definition mentions that the narrator and author are not the same, which I understand and consider an important distinction, but then it mentions that the author is a real person, which implies that the narrator is not a real person. If the narrator is not a real person, that means that I cannot be my favorite narrator, because I am, ya know, a person (I think).

So, now I’m left with two possible directions to head in. First, I can assume that this question is asking me what kind of narrator I enjoy to read from the perspective of when I’m reading. For example, the unreliable narrator, first person, third person, etc. If that’s the case, I’m not really sure that I have one. Each piece of writing I read is fulfilling a different purpose and will need to be told from different angles, so I wouldn’t be able to pick a favorite, because I think that each serves a purpose. The other angle would be assuming that this question is asking which narrator from a specific novel/story I like the most. However, this is a question that I also cannot answer, because I’m not quite sure if narrator does or does not mean the same thing as a character in the story.

The short answer to this prompt is: idk. Each week I think that I’ve grasped a concept and then the next week it is torn to shreds by another piece of literature. At the moment I’m not sure what to believe, so the answer to this question seems especially difficult.

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