The Great Gatsby

The narrator is of fundamental importance to the genre of the novel. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a narrator is defined as: “A person who narrates something, especially a character who recounts the events of a novel or narrative poem.” According to this definition, the main function of a narrator in the novel is to tell the story and, in a way, to lead the reader through the story’s events.

In discussing the importance of the narrator to the genre of the novel it is vital to distinguish between the various types of narrator. In general, a narrator will contextualise the work for the reader by giving them extra information: describing the setting, time period, and characters. However, some narrators vary in their function at

But of critical importance here is the fact that the novel has no canon of its own, as do other genres; only individual examples of the novel are historically active, not a generic canon as such. Studying other genres is analogous to studying dead languages; studying the novel, on the other hand, is like studying languages that are not only alive, but still young.”

The function of the narrator underwent many vast changes in the first century of the novel’s existence, moving from being heavily dependent on the first person to a more common usage of third-person. In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (hereafter referred to as simply ‘Tristram Shandy’) Sterne uses the first-person narrator who is also the main (and titular) character. However, he does this in a way which manages to be new and unfamiliar to the novel’s 18th century audience, despite the fact that the core aspects were not new. “From the technical perspective, Sterne's fiction is full of hypertrophied versions of the novel's conventional routines: the prefatory first-person narration, the interpolated tales, the

How does this text highlight the importance of the narrator to the genre of the novel? Northanger Abbey is a key text in the way that it displays many different narrative styles in one text, ranging from parodic (as has been discussed) to didactic and even to gothic. Northanger Abbey brings forth a range of questions about the narrator in texts of the period. As a novel, its particular oeuvre is difficult to pin down, much like Tristram Shandy. At times it appears to be a gothic; at others, it is obviously a satire on the same; and sometimes it mimics the typical romantic novel aimed at the women of the time, with handsome gentlemen and naïve young ladies taking their first steps into the world. But what does it say about narrators? Austen has oft been criticised for the shifting moods and tones in Northanger Abbey: “Generally critics are forced to conclude that while brilliant in many of its parts, the book as a whole lacks a sufficiently consistent technique or unified form to make it a coherent work of art.” but it could be said that each shift in narrator style attracts the reader’s attention to a different fundamental aspect of the novel. For example, Henry Tilney acts as “surrogate ironic commentator for the author and object of her irony” and his introduction leads us the what Frank Kearful refers to as the transformation into “a novel of education”. Catherine must undergo a series of