Narrator Description

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).