Narrator

Narrator

Management of narration: who tells, from when, at what distance, with what memory, and what that instance cannot know.

1. Founding decisions

Four decisions are taken once and recorded in the bible. Any later departure is a defect, unless it is systematised.

1. Person: first, second, third.
2. Focalisation: internal, external, zero.
3. Tense: passé simple, passé composé, present.
4. Distance: is the narrator pressed against the character, one step back, or far away.

2. Choice table

3. Narrative distance

Five degrees, from furthest to closest:

1. Narrative summary: Il passa trois ans à Kisangani.
2. Objective narration: Il descendit du bus et compta ses billets.
3. Coloured narration: Le bus le laissa dans une chaleur qui sentait le caoutchouc brûlé.
4. Free indirect speech: Trois ans. Trois ans, et toujours pas de nom sur la porte.
5. Direct thought: Je n'aurais pas dû revenir.

Rule: movement between degrees must be gradual within a scene. Jumping from degree 1 to degree 5 with no transition produces a break the reader feels as a stylistic fault.

Free indirect speech is the central tool of the French novel: it allows the third person to be held while giving the character's vocabulary and syntax. It takes no quotation marks, no italics and no introducing verb.

4. Knowledge contract

Establish explicitly:

• what the narrator knows from the first page;
• what they learn at the same moment as the reader;
• what they know but will not yet say, and why that silence is defensible in retrospect;
• what they cannot know.

A narrator with internal focalisation does not describe their own face, does not know the thoughts of others, and does not report a scene they did not attend without naming their source.

5. Unreliable narrator

Four usable forms:

• unreliability by interest: they lie to protect themselves;
• by incapacity: age, illness, intoxication, trauma;
• by values: they judge by a system the reader does not share;
• by ignorance: they report faithfully what they misunderstand.

Fairness rule: every element allowing the reader to reconstruct the truth must be present in the text before the revelation. Unreliability is a game, not a cheat.

6. Voice

A narrative voice is built on five measurable parameters:

1. average sentence length and its variance;
2. dominant vocabulary, from the narrator's trade or milieu;
3. relation to imagery: rare and strong, or numerous and sustained;
4. relation to judgement: comments, or refuses to comment;
5. punctuation rhythm, particularly the use of the colon and the semicolon.

To hold a voice across four hundred pages, write one reference page and return to it every time the manuscript is picked up after an interruption.

7. Transitions and ellipses

• An ellipsis is signalled by a section break, a temporal marker in the first sentence, or a change in the state of the world.
• Never summarise what has just been shown.
• A change of point of view happens at a typographic break, never mid paragraph.

8. Common errors

• Focalisation slip: entering a second character's head for one sentence.
• A narrator describing what they cannot see.
• Accumulated perception filters: il vit, il sentit, il remarqua.
• A uniform voice shared by the narrator and every character.
• A moral comment from the narrator at the end of a scene, which cancels its effect.

9. Auto-critique

Score 0 to 5: consistency of person and tense, focalisation held, accuracy of distance, quality of free indirect speech, knowledge contract respected, singularity of voice, handling of ellipses, absence of overhanging commentary.

Threshold: no axis below 3, average at least 3.8.

10. Interfaces

• Upstream: novel-architect.
• Lateral: scene-builder, dialogue-master.
• Review: continuity-manager, quality/literary-editor.