narrator

Voice that tells the story of a novel (or occasionally a play). The narrator may be a character in the action, in which case the narration will be in the first person, but the voice which narrates in the third person (using the more distanced and impersonal ‘he did’/‘she did’, is also a narrator, and may or may not display the views of the author. The use of the first-person narrator has both advantages and disadvantages for an author. While an apparently personal account is more credible and intimate for the reader, as in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, the disadvantage is that a single character can only have knowledge of what they see, hear about or read, and there is only one viewpoint.