FREE ESSAY ON NARRATOR

NARRATOR

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).