Description

Girded with the belief that narrative is a driving force which guides our attraction to specific works of fiction and that some narrators are constructed in such a way that results in a greater or lesser attraction on the behalf of readers, I seek to deconstruct the narrator into its principal working components. First, I provide a brief overview of relevant twentieth century narrative theory; second, I identify what I have determined to be the principal components of the narrator-ideal; third, I apply my theoretical model to selected contemporary works of fiction by Elliot Perlman and Jhumpa Lahiri to demonstrate how these components work and where they may be found.