That question popped into my head recently while I read a published story. It wasn't answered until a quarter of the way in. The narrator didn't focus on a particular character of the ensemble or settings that had been introduced. Not until the predicament had been introduced did I have any connection to the story. My connection with the story lapsed regularly throughout the story because the narrator didn't Keep In Touch with the protagonist. The question of who's the narrator got me thinking about and running through other stories. The ones I like, huh, I know who the narrator is right away and never lose touch. A duh-huh moment.

As I thought about it, I realized a narrator is my standing to a story. As I read I become the narrator who has the greatest significance of standing to a story. The narrator is my access to the characters, the setting, the tone or attitude of the story, the story itself. A small moment late one night that grew into a towering beanstalk; reader resonance resides within a narrator's standing to a story, my resonance with a story.

To test the theory of the narrator being a story's source of resonance attachment, I picked William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." A long time ago, one of my literature professors asked the class, "Who's the narrator?" about that story. A journalist by trade, the professor was paying forward and giving back to students after a long career in his field, but patently wishing he'd taken more time in his life to write creatively.

Another professor years later asked the same question of a story presented in a writing workshop. It was also a prompt for discussion. The story's narrator was like the former one above where who the narrator is isn't clear. So the question of who's the narrator had background that set it in my mind to come up again when I was ready to ask it myself.

I chose to test "A Rose for Emily" because of that earlier professor's discussion question and because the narrator is unique from being a first-person plural, subjective one. The conspiratorial "we" with restricted psychic access to thoughts, access to the consciousness of Emily's hometown's gossip grapevine. Otherwise, the narrator's psychic access to the dramatic action is objective after the fact knowledge, in third person.

From the first sentence on, I'm enthralled in every reading of the story. "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years."

Yet out of 3,600 words, there's only forty-six our's and four we's. The narration is largely in auxilliary third-person objective. "Our whole town" set up in the first sentence who the narrator is, but isn't so emphasized that it stands out. Without scrutiny, the answer of who the narrator is doesn't become apparent or in any way disruptive.

My curiosity is aroused by "respectful affection for a fallen monument," which raises questions. Fallen meaning, as indicated, dead? Or is it a foreshadowing of a deeper significance? Monuments live on after their subjects. A monument by reputation? More foreshadowing of a fall from grace. I too wanted to see the inside of Emily's house. No one had seen it in ten years. What's the secret, the skeletons in the closet Emily's been hiding?

Freyatag names messenger scenes as a common feature of introductions. Often given by the chorus in verse in his day and before him, messenger scenes have since become a melded part of story openings. What are the salient messenger features of an opening? What kind of story it is, MICE and whether either a tragedy or a comedy, what the narrator's standing to the story and psychic access to characters' thoughts are, what the story's milieu is, who the protagonist is, what the protagonist's goal, motivation, and predicament are, what's the overarching question the story poses and will artfully answer.

"A Rose for Emily," the first sentence does all that and artfully delays filling in the details. Then the story next fills in a few milieu details, a few character details, all the while heightening supsense by posing more questions and artfully delaying answers. The narrator is in control of the story's dramatic movement. The narrator being an emphemeral "consciousness" of the town allows for wide latitude in time and place, perspective and point of view. The narrator's attitude toward the topic and theme, Tone, rings through establishing the story's mood, a dark gothic mood.

A narrator is the messenger for a story. By being the messenger, a narrator provides access to a story's resonating features for readers. First and continuing reader resonance is through the narrator. I become my own messenger when I read a well-crafted story.

One thing, for me, a story must have one narrator. But even that isn't an absolute, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë has two: Mr. Lockwood and Ellen "Nelly" Dean.

Full text of "A Rose for Emily"
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/litweb05/workshops/fiction/faulkner1.asp

Wikipedia: Wuthering Heights (full text available at Project Gutenberg)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_heights

For me, the narrator is a person of the time and milieu of the story, with vocabulary and knowledge similar to the characters. In close third, the narrator is sympathetic to the MC but also has a sense of what the reader would need to know in order to understand events.

Since the narrator is a person of the story's milieu, he can only narrate in terms familiar to the milieu. For example, a narrator of a 19th century Western tale could not describe smoke signals as the nearest to cell-phone communications they had. Nor could he describe someone on horseback as roaring up the street in a cloud of dust like a hotrod. If instead he uses the langauge of the time, only modernised sufficient to be understood by modern readers, he provides some of the resonance you mention, I believe.

So to answer the question, when the POV is close third, I think the narrator might be thought of as either a sympathetic journalist of the time and milieu, or MC herself with perfect recall and a sense of theatre, telling the story to her kids.

A messenger scene opening answers the basic five questions much like a news report: who, what, when, where, and why. However, a story differs from a news report by the nature of a narrator's standing to a story. A news report is anonymously, objectively offered for the public's interest in a newsworthy circumstance, assumed to be factual, where a fictional account is known to be fiction and requires a suspension of disbelief. If a narrator's standing to a story is clear, a reader goes along with the narrator as though the story is a factual account.

In addition to answering the initial questions posed by a story, who it's about, what it's about, when and where whatever occurs, why whatever occurs, and sometimes how whatever occurs, knowing a narrator's standing to a story comes from answering who the narrator is and, more importantly, answering what a narrator's standing is to the characters and predicament. When and where, answering those questions positions a reader in the narrator's cosmos. Why, answering that question, a narrator shows and tells a reader why the story matters to the narrator, and thus a reader. And sometimes how, answering how a narrator knows the circumstances of a story.

In objective narratives, a narrator isn't as close to a story as in subjective narratives. Objective narrators have remote, anonymous standing to a story, yet, the after-the-fact knowledge of an objective narrator has a quality of objective truthfulness that enhances a story's believability. A subjective narrator, while more intimate in standing to a story, challenges a story's believability from its single distinguishing feature, psychic access to thoughts, which is a plausible but improbable phenomena. A narrator's psychic access to thoughts counters the improbability of mind reading by creating a resonance with what a reader's experiences and thoughts bring to a story.

In reading, I'm mostly content with an anonymous, objective narrator, but prefer a knowable narrator for subjective narratives. An anonymous subjective narrator with psychic access to a protagonist's thoughts makes me a little uncomfortable by distancing the narrator (and me) from a story, voyeuristic-like uncomfortable. Overcoming that discomfort complicates an anonymous subjective narrative. But when it's done well, I don't notice my discomfort.

After dissecting and studying more than several stories' narrative modes, I've found that a narrative has three axes of relational standing: grammatical person, tone, and psychic access.

Grammatical person, a narrator's standing to a story: first, second, third, and uncommonly fourth or fifth person.

Tone, objective or subjective. A narrator and/or characters' attitude toward a topic or theme. An objective attitude, by definition an unbiased one, has a neutral valence. Subjective, either a positive or a negative attitude.

Psychic access, access to characters' thoughts ranging from omniscient to limited to one character to none.

What I also found is that a well-crafted story smoothly varies the intersection point of the three axes within a small sphere of possibility and a poorly crafted story stays fixed on a single point, too tight, or on too loose of a sphere. A three dimensional narrator varies person, tone, and psychic access, even an anonymous one.

I found that first- or second-person narratives use related pronouns as sentence subjects in an average ratio of 1:8 to third person sentence subjects. Third person stays in third person except in characters' discourse.

In tone, I found that when a narrator has an objective standing to a theme, the protagonist carries a story's subjective attitude. In that case, the narrator is otherwise anonymous, albeit sometimes with a light subjective touch through metaphorical modifiers of subjects, predicates, and objects. I.e., The angry sun settled on the horizon, Sir Isaac Newton's zealous pursuit of scientific knowledge advanced the human condition, Radioactive snowflakes fell from pill-bottle cotton clouds.

In subjective narrator stories, the narrator's attitude toward a theme might be in opposition to or in accord with a protagonist's, but rarely in accord with a nemesis or villain's. However, a subjective narrator has a more intimate standing to a story than an objective one, and also typically conveys a story's focal attitude toward a theme.

Psychic access, an objective or subjective narrator who has access to thoughts only has interior access to a single focal character's in any one dramatic unit. However, due to the character's attitude, an auxilliary objective narrator without an attitude might be less complex than a subjective narrator and avoids confusing the narrator's attitude with a character's. In other words, a narrator's attitude in a single story might also vary between objective and subjective according to the strength of a character's attitude.

Emcee originated as a spoken abbreviation that became spelled-out in written word, master of ceremonies, MC (1933). In a face-to-face workshop, one of the participants used emcee while discussing the story on the hot seat. The context was clear to me, but a good portion of the group thought she meant main character. Everyone had a look of consternation on their faces as the speaker continued. Confusion increased to the point that no one thought they'd read the same story as the speaker was talking about, even the facilitator. She was right about the narrator being like a master of ceremonies; however, nearly everyone thought she was talking about the protagonist. The story was a third-person narrative.

quote:

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Even some of the dialogue is told as in: 'She asked him where he was going and he replied that it was none of her business.'

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Jane Austen did that occasionally in her books. I've read, and enjoyed the book, by the way, and I suspect it's intended to be "in the style of Jane Austen" and other writers of the time.