Narrator

The narrator is the subject of the exposition of events in an epic work — the one who tells the story; it is an artistic category that must be distinguished from the real author. The narrator may be omniscient (auctorial), knowing everything about the characters, their thoughts, and their future, or a character-participant in the events (first-person narration), or an outside observer. The type of narrator determines the angle of depiction, the degree of objectivity, and the reader's trust. Omniscient narration is characteristic of the classic realist novel (Panas Myrny, Leo Tolstoy); first-person narration, which lends intimacy and limits the view to the hero's consciousness, marks, for example, Oleksandr Dovzhenko's film-tale The Enchanted Desna. A special type is the folk narrator-stylizer in the prose of Marko Vovchok or Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, whose language reproduces living folk speech. The figure of the narrator is a key category of narratology, the science of narration.