Este artículo se ha incluido en este espacio web con el permiso de su autor.  La trasnscripción se ha hecho a partir de:

Prince, Gerald. “An Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.”  Trans. Francis Mariner.
           Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Ed. Jane P.
            Tompkin.  Baltimore and London:  John Hopkins U P, 1984. 7-25.

An Introduction to the Study of the Narratee

Nowadays, any student minimally versed in the narrative genre differentiates the narrator of a novel from its author and from the novelistic alter ego of the author and knows the difference between Marcel and Proust, Rieux and Camus, Tristam Shandy, Sterne the novelist, and Sterne the man.  Most critics, however, are scarcely concerned with the notion of the narratee and often confuse it with the more or less adjacent notions of receptor (récepteur), reader, and arch-reader (archilecteur). The fact that the word narratee is rarely employed, moreover, is significant.

This lack of critical interest in narratees is not inexplicable.  Indeed, their study has been neglected, more than likely, because of a characteristic of the narrative genre itself; if the protagonist or dominant personality of a narration often assumes the role of the narrator and affirms himself as such (Marcel in A la recherche du temps perdu, Roquentin in La Nausée, Jaques Revel in L’Emploi du temps), there is no hero who is above the narratee,  or perhaps a work like La Modification.  Besides, it should not be forgotten that the narrator, on a superficial if not a profound level, is more responsible than his narratee for the shape and tone of the story as well as for its other characteristics.  Finally, many problems of poetic narrative that might have been approached from the angle of the narratee have already been studied from the point of view of the narrator; after all, the individual who relates a story and the person to whom the story is told are more or less interdependent in any narration.

 Whatever the case may be, narratees deserve to be studied.  Major storytellers and novelists, as well as the less important, bear out this point.  The variety of narratees found in fictive narrations is phenomenal.  Docile or rebellious, admirable or ridiculous, ignorant of the events related to them or having prior knowledge of them, slightly naïve as in Tom Jones, vaguely callous as in The BrothersKaramazov, narratees rival narrators in their diversity.  Moreover, many novelists have in their own way examined the distinctions that should be maintained between the narratee and the receptor or between the narratee and the reader.  In a detective novel by Nicholas Blake, for example, and in another by Philip Loraine, the detective succeeds in solving the crime when he realizes that the narratee and the receptor are not the same.  In addition, there is no want of narratives that underscore the importance of the narratee, A Thousand and One Nights providing an excellent illustration.  Scheherazade must exercise her talent as a storyteller or die, for as long as she is able to retain the attention of the caliph with her stories, she will not be executed.  It is evident that the heroine’s fate and that of the narration depend not only upon her capabilities as a storyteller, but also upon the humor of the narratee.  If the caliph should become tired and stop listening, Scheherazade will die and the narrative will end.  The same fundamental situation can be found in the encounter of Ulysses with the Sirens,  as well as in a more recent work.  Like Scheherazade, the hero of La Chute has a desperate need for a certain type of narratee.  In order to forget his own guilt, Jean-Baptiste Clamence must find someone who will listen to him and whom he will be able to convince of everyone’s guilt.  He finds this someone at the Mexico City Bar in Amsterdam and it is at that moment that his narrative account begins.

The Zero-Degree Narratee

In the very first pages of Le Père Goriot, the narrator exclaims: “That’s what you will do, you who hold this book with a white hand, you who settle back in a well-padded armchair saying to yourself: perhaps this is going to be amusing.  After reading about old Goriot’s secret misfortunes, you’ll dine with a good appetite attributing your insensitivity to the author whom you’ll accuse of exaggeration and poetic affectation.”  This “you” with white hands, accused by the narrator of being egotistical and callous, is the narratee.  It’s obvious that the latter does not resemble most readers of Le Père Goriot and that consequently the narratee of a novel cannot be automatically identified with the reader: the reader’s hands might be black or red and not white; he might read the novel in bed instead of in an armchair; he might lose his appetite upon learning of the old merchant’s unhappiness.  The reader of a fiction, be it in prose or in verse, should not be mistaken for the narratee.  The one is real, the other fictive.  If it should occur that the reader bears an astonishing resemblance to the narratee, this is an exception and not the rule.

Neither should the narratee be confused with the virtual reader.  Every author, provided he is writing for someone other than himself, develops his narrative as a function of a certain type of reader whom he bestows with certain qualities, faculties, and inclinations according to his opinion of men in general (or in particular) and according to the obligations he feels should be respected.  This virtual reader is different from the real reader: writers frequently have a public they don’t deserve.  He is also distinct from the narratee.  In La Chute, Clamence’s narratee is not identical to the reader envisioned by Camus: after all, he’s a lawyer visiting Amsterdam.  It goes without saying that a virtual reader and a narratee can be alike, but once again it would be an exception.

Finally, we should not confuse the narrate with the ideal reader, although a remarkable
likeness can exist between the two.  For a writer, an ideal reader would be one who
would understand perfectly and would approve entirely the least of his words, the most
subtle of his intentions. For a critic, an ideal reader would perhaps be one
capable of interpreting the infinity of texts that, according to certain critics, can be found in one specific text.  On the one hand, the narratees for whom the narrator multiplies his explanations and justifies the particularities of his narrative are numerous and cannot be thought of as constituting the ideal readers dreamed up by a novelist.  We need only think of the narratees of Le Père Goriot and Vanity Fair.  On the other hand, these narratees are too inept to be capable of interpreting even a rather restricted group of texts within the text.

If narratees are distinct from real, virtual, or ideal readers,  they very often differ from each other as well.  Nonetheless, it should be possible to describe each one of them as a function of the same categories and according to the same models.  It is necessary to identify at least some of these characteristics as well as some of the ways in which they vary and combine with each other.  These characteristics must be situated with reference to a sort of “zero-degree narratee”, a concept which it is now time to define.

In the first place, the zero-degree narratee knows the tongue (langue) and the language(s) (langage[s]) of the narrator.  In his case, to know a tongue is to know the meanings (dénotations) – the signifieds as such and, if applicable, the referents – of all the signs that constitute it; this does not include knowledge of the connotations (the subjective values that have been attached to them).  It also involves a perfect mastery of grammar but not of the (infinite) paragrammatical possibilities.  It is the ability to note semantics and/or syntactic ambiguities and to be able to resolve these difficulties from the context.  It is the capacity to recognize the grammatical incorrectness or oddness of any sentence or syntagm – by reference to the linguistic system being used.

Beyond this knowledge of language, the zero-degree narratee has certain faculties of reasoning that are often only the corollaries of this knowledge.  Given a sentence or a series of sentences, he is able to grasp the presuppositions and the consequences.   The zero-degree narratee knows narrative grammar, the rules by which any story is elaborated.   He knows, for example, that a minimal complete narrative sequence consists in the passage from a given situation to the inverse situation.  He knows that the narrative possesses a temporal dimension and that it necessitates relations of causality. Finally, the zero-degree narratee possesses a sure memory, at least in regard to the events of the narrative about which he has been informed and the consequences that can be drawn from them.

Thus, he does not lack positive characteristics.  But he also does not want negative traits.  He can thus only follow a narrative in a well-defined and concrete way and is obliged to acquaint himself with the events by reading from the first page to the last, from the initial word to the final word.  In addition, he is without any personality or social characteristics.  He is neither good nor bad, pessimistic nor optimistic, revolutionary nor bourgeois, and his character, his position in society, never colors his perception of the events described to him.  Moreover, he knows absolutely nothing about the events or characters mentioned and he is not acquainted with the conventions prevailing in that world or in any other world.  Just as he doesn’t understand the connotations of a certain turn of phrase, he doesn’t realize what can be evoked by this or that situation, this or that novelistic action.  The consequences of this are very important.  Without the assistance of the narrator, without his explanations and the information supplied by him, the narratee is able neither to interpret the value of an action nor to grasp its repercussions.  He is incapable of determining the morality or immorality of a character, the realism or extravagance of a description, the merits of a rejoinder, the satirical intention of a tirade.  And how would he be able to do so? By virtue of what experience, what knowledge, or what system of values?

More particularly, a notion as fundamental as verisimilitude only counts very slightly for him. Indeed, verisimilitude is always defined in relation to another text, whether this text be public opinion, the rules of a literary genre, or “reality.”  The zero-degree narratee, however, is acquainted with no texts and in the absence of commentary, the adventures of DonQuixote would seem as ordinary to him as those of Passemurailles (an individual capable of walking through walls) or of the protagonist of Une Belle Journée.   The same would hold true for relations of implicit causality.  If I learn in La légendede Saint Julien L’Hospitalier that “Julien believes he has killed his father and faints,” I establish a causal relationship between these two propositions founded upon a certain common sense logic, my experience of the world, and my knowledge of certain novelistic convention.  We are, moreover, aware that one of the mechanisms of the narrative process “is the confusion of consecutiveness and consequence, what comes after being read in the narrative as caused by…”   But the narratee with no experience and no common sense does not perceive relations of implicit causality and does not fall victim to this confusion.  Finally, the zero-degree narratee does not organize the narrative as a function of the major codes of reading studied by Roland Barthes in S/Z.  He doesn’t know how to unscramble the different voices that shape the narration. After all, as Barthes has said: “The code is a convergence of quotations, a structural mirage…the resulting units…made up of fragments of this something which always has already been read, seen, done, lived: the code is the groove of this already.  Referring back to what has been written, that is, to the Book (of culture, of life, of life as culture), the code makes the text a prospectus of this Book.”   For the zero-degree narratee, there is no already, there is no Book.

The Signals of the Narratee

Every narratee possesses the characteristics that we have enumerated except when an indication to the contrary is supplied in the narration intended for him: he knows, for example, the language employed by the narrator, he is gifted with an excellent memory, he is unfamiliar with everything concerning the characters who are presented to him.  It is not rare that a narrative might deny or contradict these characteristics: a certain passage might underline the language-related difficulties of the narratee, another passage might disclose that he suffers from amnesia, yet another passage might emphasize his knowledge of the problems being discussed.  It is on the basis of these deviations from the characteristics of the zero-degree narratee that the portrait of a specific narratee is gradually constituted.

Certain indications supplied by the text concerning a narratee are sometimes found in a section of the narrative that is not addressed to him.  One has only to think of L’Immoraliste, the two Justines, or Heart of Darkness to verify that no only the physical appearance, the personality, and civil status of a narratee can be discussed in this fashion, but also his experience and his past.  These indications may precede the portion of the narrative intended for the narratee, or may follow, interrupt, or frame it. Most often, they confirm what the rest of the narration has revealed to us.  At the beginning of L’Immmoraliste, for example, we learn that Michel has not seen his narratees for three years and the story he tells them quickly confirms this fact.  Nonetheless, sometimes these indications contradict the narrative and emphasize certain differences between the narratee as conceived by the narrator and as revealed by another voice.  The few words spoken by Doctor Spielvogel ant the end of Portnoy’s complaint reveal that he is not what the narrative has led us to believe.

Nevertheless, the portrait of a narratee emerges above all from the narrative addressed to him.  If we consider that any narration is composed of a series of signals directed to the narratee, two major categories of signals can be distinguished.  On the one hand, there are those signals that contain no reference to the narratee or, more precisely, no reference differentiating him from the zero-degree narratee.  On the other hand, there are those signals that, on the contrary, define him as a specific narratee and make him deviate from the established norms.  In Un Coeur simple a sentence such as “She threw herself on the ground” would fall into the first category; this sentence reveals nothing in particular about the narratee while still permitting him to appreciate the sorrow of Félicité.  On the contrary, a sentence such as “His entire person produced in her that confusion into which we are all thrown by the spectacle of extraordinary men” not only records the reactions of the heroine in the presence of M. Bourais, but also informs us that the narratee has experienced the same feelings in the presence of extraordinary individuals.  By interpreting all signals of the narration as a function of the narratee, we can obtain a partial reading of the text, but a well-defined and reproducible reading.  By regrouping and studying the signals of the second category, we can reconstruct the portrait of the narratee, a portrait more or less distinct, original, and complete depending upon the text considered.
 The signals belonging to the second category are not always easy to recognize or to interpret.  In fact, if many of them are quite explicit, others are much less so.  The indications supplied on the narratee at the beginning of Le Père Goriot are very clear and present no problem: “That’s what you will do, you who hold this book with a white hand, you who settle back in a well-padded armchair…” But the first two sentences of The Sun Also Rises present more difficulty.  Jake does not explicitly state that, according to his narratee, to say that a man has been a boxing champion is to express admiration for him.  It is enough for him to imply this: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.”  A greater number of indications concerning this or that narratee are even more indirect.  Obviously, any indication, whether explicit or indirect, should be interpreted on the basis of the text itself, using as a guide the language employed, its presuppositions, the logical consequences that it entails, and the already established knowledge of the narratee.

The signals capable of portraying the narratee are quite varied and one can easily distinguish several types that are worth discussing.  In the first place, we should mention all passages of a narrative in which the narrator refers directly to the narratee.  We retain in this category statements in which the narrator designates the narratee by such words as “reader” or “listener” and by such expressions as “my dear” or “my friend.” In the event that the narration may have  identified a specific characteristic of the narratee, for example, his profession or nationality, passages mentioning this characteristic should also be considered in this first category.  Thus, if the narratee is a lawyer, all information concerning lawyers in general is pertinent.  Finally, we should retain all passages in which the addressee is designated by second-person pronouns and verb forms.

Besides those passages referring quite explicitly to the narratee, there are passages that, although not written in the second person, imply a narratee and describe him.  When Marcel in A la recherche du temps perdu writes: “Besides, most often, we didn’t stay at home, we went for a walk,” the “we” excludes the narratee.  On the contrary, when he declares: “Undoubtedly, in these coincidences which are so perfect, when reality withdraws and applies itself to what we have dreamt about for so long a time, it hides it from us entirely,” the ”we” includes the narratee.  Often an impersonal expression or an indefinite pronoun can only refer to the narratee: “But, the work completed, perhaps one will have shed a few tears intra muros and extra.”

Then again, there are often numerous passages in a narrative that, though they contain apparently no reference – even an ambiguous one – to  a narratee, describe him in greater or lesser detail.  Accordingly, certain parts of a narrative may be presented in the form of questions or pseudo-questions.  Sometimes these questions originate neither with a character nor with the narrator who merely repeats them.  These questions must then be attributed to the narratee and we should note what excites his curiosity, the kinds of problems he would like to resolve.  In Le Père Goriot, for example, it is the narratee who makes inquiries about the career of M. Poiret: “What had he been? But perhaps he had been employed at the Ministry of Justice…” Sometimes, however, the narrator addresses questions to the narratee himself, some of whose knowledge and defenses are thus revealed in the process.  Marcel will address a pseudo-question to his narratee asking him to explain the slightly vulgar, and for that reason surprising, behavior of Swann: “But who has not seen unaffected royal princesses…spontaneously adopt the language of old bores?…”

Other passages are presented in the form of negations. Certain of these passages are no more the extension of a given character’s statement than they are the response to a given narrator’s question. It is rather the beliefs of the narratee that these passages contradict, his preoccupations that are attacked, and his questions that are silenced.  The narrator of Les Faux-Monnayeurs vigorously rejects the theory advanced by the narratee to explain Vincent Molinier’s nocturnal departures: “No, it was not to his mistress that Vincent Molinier went each evening.” Sometimes a partial negation can be revelatory.  In A la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator, while believing that the narratee’s conjectures about the extraordinary suffering of Swann are well-founded, at the same time finds them insufficient: “This suffering which he felt resembled nothing he had ever thought possible.  Not only because in his hours of deepest doubt he had rarely imagined anything so painful, but because even when he imagined this thing, it remained vague, uncertain…”

There are also passages that include a term with demonstrative significance that instead of referring to an anterior or ulterior element of the narrative, refers to another text, to extra-textual experience (hors-texte) known to the narrator and his narratee. “He looked at the tomb and there buried his final tear as a young man…one of those tears which though they fall to the earth flow upward to the heavens.”  From these few lines, the narrate of Le Père Goriot recognized the kind of tears buried by Rastignac.  He has certainly heard about them, without a doubt he has seen them, perhaps he has shed some himself.

Comparisons or analogies found in a narration also furnish us with information more or less valuable.  Indeed, the second term of a comparison is always assumed to be known better than the first.  On this basis, we can assume that the narratee of The Gold Pot, for example, has already heard the bursting of thunder (“The voice faded like the faraway muffled rumbling of thunder”), and we can accordingly begin the partial reconstruction of the type of universe with which he is familiar.

But perhaps, the most revelatory signals and at times the most difficult to grasp and describe in a satisfactory way are those we shall call – for lack of a more appropriate term – over-justifications (surjustifications). Any narrator more or less explains the world inhabited by his characters, motivates their acts, and justifies their thoughts.  If it occurs that these explanations and motivations are situated at the level of metalanguage, meta-commentary, or meta-narration, they are over-justifications.  When the narrator of La Chartreuse de Parme advises the narratee that at La Scala “it’s customary for visits to the boxes to last only twenty minutes or so,” he is only thinking about supplying the narratee with information necessary for the understanding of the events.  On the other hand, when he asks to be excused for a poorly phrased sentence, when he excuses himself for having to interrupt his narrative, when he confesses himself incapable of describing well a certain feeling, these are over-justifications that he employs. Over-justifications always provide us with interesting details about the narratee’s personality, even though they often do so in an indirect way; in overcoming the narratee’s defenses, in prevailing over his prejudices, in allaying his apprehensions, they reveal them.

The narratee’s signals – those that describe him as well as those that only provide him with information – can pose many problems for the reader who would wish to classify them in order to arrive at a portrait of the narratee or a certain reading of the text.  It’s not simply a question of their being sometimes difficult to notice, to grasp, or to explain, but in certain narratives, one can find contradictory signals.  Sometimes they originate with a narrator who wishes to amuse himself at the expense of the narratee or underscore the arbitrariness of the text; often the world presented is a world in which the principles of contradiction known to us don’t exist or are not applicable; finally, the contradictions – the entirely obvious ones – often result from the different points of view that the narrator strives to reproduce faithfully.  Nonetheless it occurs that not all contradictory data can be entirely explained in this fashion.  In these cases, they should be attributed to the author’s ineptness – or temperament. In many pornographic novels, in the worst as well as in the best, the narrator, like the heroes of La Cantatrice chauve, will first describe a character as having blond hair, large breasts, and a bulging stomach and then on the following page will speak with as much conviction of her black hair, her flat stomach, and her small breasts.  Coherence is certainly not an imperative for the pornographic genre in with a wild variation is the rule rather than the exception.  It nonetheless remains that in these cases, it is difficult – if not impossible – to interpret the semantic material presented to the narratee.

Sometimes it is the signals describing the narratee that form a strangely disparate collection.  Indeed, every signal relating to a narratee need not continue or confirm a preceding signal or announce a signal to follow.  There are narratees who change much as narrators do or who have a rich enough personality to embrace various tendencies and feelings.  But the contradictory nature of certain narratees does not always result from a complex personality or a subtle evolution.  The first pages of Le Père Goriot indicate that a Parisian narratee would be able to appreciate “the particularities of this scene full of local observations and color.” But these opening pages contradict what they have just asserted in accusing the narratee of insensitivity and in judging him guilty of mistaking reality for fiction.  This contradiction will never be resolved.  On the contrary, other contradictions will be added and it will become more and more difficult to know whom the narrator addresses.  A case of ineptitude? Perhaps Balzac does not worry about technical details and sometimes commits errors which in a Flaubert or a Henry James would be shocking.  But this is a revelatory instance of ineptitude: Balzac, who is obsessed with problems of identity – these problems are certainly very important in Le Père Goriot – does not manage to decide who will be his narratee.

Despite the questions posed, the difficulties raised, the errors committed, it is evident that the kinds of signals used, their respective numbers, and their distribution determine to a certain extent the different types of narrative.  Narratives in which explanations and motivations abound (Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, Les Illusions perdues and Le Temps retrouvé) are very different from those in which explanations and motivations play a limited role (The Killers, The Maltese Falcon, La Jalousie). The former are often by narrators who find the dimension of discourse (discours) more important than that of narrative (récit) or who are acutely aware of the gratuitousness – and even the falseness – of any narrative or of a certain type of narrative and consequently try to exorcise it.  The latter are produced by narrators who feel perfectly at ease in the narrative (récit) or who, for different reasons, wish to be transported from their usual surroundings. Moreover, explanations and motivations can present themselves for what they are or, on the other hand, can dissimulate their nature by disguising themselves more or less completely. A narrator of Balzac or Stendhal does not hesitate to declare the necessity of explaining a thought, an act, or a situation. “We are obliged at this point to interrupt for a moment the story of this bold undertaking in order to supply an indispensable detail which will explain in part the duchess’ courage in advising Fabrice upon this quite dangerous flight.” But Flaubert’s narrators – in particular after Madame Bovary – often play upon ambiguity and we no longer know exactly if one sentence explains another or if it merely follows or precedes it: “He assembled an army. It became bigger. He became famous. He was sought after.” Explanations can also be presented in the form of universal rules or general laws as in Balzac and Zola or can avoid as much as possible all generality as in the novels of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Explanations can contradict or confirm one another, be repeated or used a single time, appear only at strategic moments or occur anywhere in the narrative. Each time a different type of narration is constructed.

Classification of Narratees

Thanks to the signals describing the narratee, we are able to characterize any narration according to the type of narratee to whom it is addressed. It would be useless, because too long, too complicated, and too imprecise, to distinguish different categories of narratees according to their temperament, their civil status, or their beliefs. On the other hand, it would be comparatively easy to classify narratees according to their narrative situation, to their position in reference to the narrator, the characters, and the narration.

Many narrations appear to be addressed to no one in particular; no character is regarded as playing the role of narratee and no narratee is mentioned by the narrator either directly (“Without a doubt, dear reader, you have never been confined in a glass bottle.”) or indirectly (“We could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader”). Just as a detailed study of a novel such as L’Education sentimentale or Ulysses reveals the presence of a narrator who tries to be invisible and to intervene as little as possible in the course of the events, so too a thorough examination of a narration that appears to have no narratee – the two works mentioned above as well as Sanctuary, L’Etranger, and Un Coeur simple – permits his discovery.  The narrator of Un Coeur simple, for example, does not refer a single time to a narratee in an explicit manner. In his narrative, nonetheless, there are numerous passages indicating more or less clearly that he is addressing someone. It is thus that the narrator identifies the individuals whose proper names he mentions: “Robelin , the farmer from Geoffosses…Liébard, the farmer from Touques…M. Bourais, a former lawyer.” It cannot be for himself that he identifies Robelin, Liébard, or M. Bourais: it must be for his narratee. Moreover, the narrator often resorts to comparisons in order to describe a character or situate an event, and each comparison defines more precisely the type of universe known to the narratee. Finally, the narrator sometimes refers to extra-textual experiences (“that confusion into which we are all thrown by the spectacle of extraordinary men”), which provide proof of the narratee’s existence and information about his nature. Thus, even though the narratee may be invisible in a narration, he nonetheless exists and is never entirely forgotten.

In many other narrations, if the narratee is not represented by a character, he is at least mentioned explicitly by the narrator. The latter refers to him more or less frequently and his references can be quite direct (Eugene Onegin, The gold Pot, Tom Jones) or quite indirect (The Scarlet Letter, The Old Curiosity Shop, Les Faux-Monnayeurs). Like the narratee of Un Coeur simple, these narratees are nameless and their role in the narrative is not always very important. Yet because of the passages that designate them in an explicit manner, it is easy to draw their portrait and to know what their narrator thinks of them. Sometimes, in Tom Jones, the narrator supplies so much information about his narratee, takes him aside so often, lavishes his advice upon him so frequently, that the latter becomes as clearly defined as any character.

Often instead of addressing – explicitly or implicitly – a narratee who is not a character, the narrator recounts his story to someone who is (Heart of Darkness, Portnoy’s Complaint, Les Infortunes de la vertu). This character can be described in a more or less detailed manner. We know practically nothing about Doctor Spielvogel in Portnoy’s Complaint, except that he is not lacking in perspicacity. On the other hand, in Les Infortunes de la vertu, we are informed about all of Juliette’s life.

The narratee-character might play no other role in the narrative than that of narratee (Heart of Darkness). But he might also play other roles. It is not rare, for example, for him to be at the same time a narrator. In L’Immoraliste, one of the three individuals listening to Michel writes a long letter to his brother. In this letter, he repeats the story told to him by his friend, entreats his brother to shake Michel from his unhappiness, and records his own reactions to the narrative as well as the circumstances that led to his being present at its telling. Sometimes the narratee of a story can be at the same time its narrator. He doesn’t intend the narration to be for anyone other than himself. In LaNausée, for example, as in most novels written in the form of a diary, Roquentin counts on being the only reader of his journal.

Then again, the narratee-character can be more or less affected, more or less influenced by the narrative addressed to him. In Heart of Darkness, the companions of Marlowe are not transformed by the story that he recounts to them. In L’Immoraliste, the three narratees, if they are not really different from what they were before Michel’s account, are nonetheless “overcome by a strange feeling of malaise.” And in La Nausée, as in many other works in which the narrator constitutes his own narratee, the latter is gradually and profoundly changed by the events he recounts for himself.

Finally, the narratee-character can represent for the narration someone more or less essential, more or less irreplaceable as a narratee. In Heart of Darkness, it’s not necessary for Marlowe to have his comrades on the Nellie as narratees. He would be able to recount his story to any other group: perhaps he would be able to refrain from telling it at all. On the other hand, in L’Immoraliste, Michel wished to address his friends and for that reason gathered them around him. Their presence in Algeria holds out hope: they will certainly not condemn him, they will perhaps understand him ,and they will certainly help him get over his current situation. And in A Thousand and One Nights, to have the caliph as narratee is the difference between life and death for Scheherazade. If he refuses to listen to her, she will be killed. He is thus the only narratee whom she can have.

Whether or not he assumes the role of character, whether or not he is irreplaceable, whether he plays several roles or just one, the narratee can be a listener (L’Immoraliste, Les Infortunes de la vertu, A Thousand and One Nights) or a reader (Adan Bede, Le Père Goriot, Les Faux-Monnayeurs). Obviously, a text may not necessarily say whether the narratee is a reader or a listener. In such cases, it could be said that the narratee is a reader when the narration is written (Hérodias) and a listener when the narration is oral (La Chanson de Roland).

…We could probably think of other distinctions or establish  other categories, but in any case, we can see how much more precise and more refined the typology of narrative would be if it were based not only upon narrators but also upon narratees. The same type of narrator can address very different types of narratees. Thus, Louis (Le Noeud de vipères), Slavin (Journal de Salavin), and Roquentin (La Nausée) are three characters who all keep a journal and who are very conscious of writing.  But Louis changes narratees several times before deciding to write for himself; Slavin does not regard himself as the sole reader of his journal; and Roquentin writes exclusively for himself. Then again, very different narrators can address narratees of the same type. The narrators of Un Coeur simple and La Condition humaine as well as Meursault inL’Etranger all address a narratee who is not a character, who doesn’t know them and who is not familiar with the individuals presented in the text nor with the events recounted.

Nonetheless, it is not only for a typology of the narrative genre and for a history of novelistic techniques that the notion of the narratee is important. Indeed, this notion is more interesting, because it permits us to study better the way in which a narration functions. In all narrations, a dialogue is established between the narrator(s), and the character(s).  This dialogue develops – and consequently the narration also – as a function of the distance separating them from each other. In distinguishing the different categories of narratees, we have already used this concept, but without dwelling upon it too much: it is clear that a narratee who has participated in the events recorded is, in one sense, much closer to the characters than a narratee who has never even heard of them. But the notion of distance should be generalized. Whatever the point of view adopted – moral, intellectual, emotional, physical – narrator(s), narratee(s), and character(s) can be more or less close to each other ranging from the most perfect identification to the most complete opposition.

…As there are often several narrators, several narratees, and several characters in a text, the complexity of the rapports and the variety of the distances that are established between them can be quite significant. In any case, these rapports and these distances determine to a great extent the way in which certain values are praised and others are rejected in the course of a narration and the way in which certain events are emphasized and others are nearly passed over in silence. They determine as well the tone and the very nature of the narration. In Les Cloches de Bále for example, the tone changes completely – and cannot but change – once the narrator decides to proclaim his friendship for the narratee and to speak to him more honestly and more directly than he had previously: abandoning romantic extravagance, he becomes quasidocumentary, leaving behind false detachment, he becomes brotherly. On the other hand, many ironic effects in narration depend upon the differences existing between two images of the narratee or between two (groups of) narratees (Les Infortunes de la vertu, Werther), upon the distance existing between narrator and narratee on the one hand and character on the other (Un Amour de Swann), or yet again upon the distance existing between narrator and narratee (Tom Jones). The complexity of a situation results sometimes from the instability of the distances existing between the narrator, the narratee, and the characters. If Michel’s guilt – or innocence – is not clearly established, it is partly because several times he shows himself capable of overcoming the distance separating him from his friends, or, if one prefers, because his friends are unsure of how much distance to put between themselves and him….

The Narratee’s Functions

The type of narratee that we find in a given narrative, the relations that tie him to narrators, characteristics, and other narratees, the distances that separate him from ideal, virtual, or real readers partially determine the nature of this narrative. But the narratee exercises other functions that are more or less numerous and important and are more or less specific to him. It will be worth the effort to enumerate these functions and to study them in some detail.

The most obvious role of the narratee, a role that he always plays in a certain sense, is that of relay between the narrator and the reader(s), or rather between the author and the reader(s). Should certain values have to be defended or certain ambiguities clarified, this can easily be done by means of asides addressed to the narrates. Should the importance of a series of events be emphasized, should one reassure or make uneasy, justify certain actions or underscore their arbitrariness, this can always be done by addressing signals to the narratee. In Tom Jones, for example, the narrator explains to the narratee that prudence is necessary for the preservation of virtue, an explanation that allows us to judge better his hero, virtuous but imprudent: “Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best men…It is not enough that your designs, nay, that your actions, are intrinsically good, you must take care they shall appear so.” Likewise, we know that although Legrandin is a snob, he is not lying when he protests against snobbery because Marcel says quite clearly to his narratee: “And indeed, that doesn’t mean that Legrandin was not sincere when he inveighed against snobs.” Indeed, the mediation doesn’t always operate that directly: thus, narrator-narratee relations are sometimes developed in the ironic mode and the reader cannot always interpret literally the statements of the former to the latter. There exist other conceivable relays than direct and explicit asides addressed to the narratee, other possibilities of mediation between authors and readers. Dialogues, metaphors, symbolic situations, allusions to a particular system of thought or to a certain work of art are some of the ways of manipulating the reader, guiding his judgments, and controlling his reactions. Moreover, those are the methods preferred by many modern novelists, if not the majority of them; perhaps because they accord or seem to accord more freedom to the reader, perhaps because they oblige him to participate more actively in the development of the narrative, or perhaps simply because they satisfy a certain concern for realism. The role of the narratee as mediator is rather reduced in these cases. Everything must still pass via the narratee since everything – metaphors, allusions, dialogues –i s still addressed to him; but nothing is modified, nothing is clarified for the reader by this passage. Whatever the advantages may be of this type of mediator it should nonetheless be recognized that from a certain point of view, direct and explicit statements by the narrator to the narratee are the most economical and the most effective sort of mediation. A few sentences suffice to establish the true significance of an unexpected act or the true nature of a character; a few words suffice to facilitate the interpretation of a complex situation. Although we can question indefinitely Stephen’s esthetic maturity in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or the significance of a particular act in A Farewell to Arms, we always know exactly – or almost
always – according to the text, what to think of Fabrice and la Sanseverina or of the intrigues
of Mlle. Michonnearu.

Besides the function of mediation, the narratee exercises in any narration a function of characterization… In the case of narrator-characters, the function of characterization is important although it can be reduced to a minimum even here: because he is at a distance from everything and from himself, because his strangeness and solitude depend upon this distance, Meursault would not know how to engage in a true dialogue with his narratee and, thus, cannot be described by this dialogue. Nonetheless, the relations that a narrator-character establishes with his narratee reveal as much – if not more – about his character than any other element in the narrative. In La Religeuse, sister Suzanne, because of her conception of the narratee and her asides addressed to him, emerges as much less naïve and much more calculating and coquettish than she would like to appear.

… Moreover, the relations between the narrator and the narratee in a text may underscore one theme, illustrate another, or contradict yet another. Often the theme refers directly to the narrative situation and it is the narration as theme that these relations reveal. In A Thousand and One Nights, for instance, the theme of narration as life is emphasized by the attitude of Scheherazade toward the caliph and vice-versa: the heroine will die if her narratee decides not to listen to her any more, just as other characters in the narrative die because he will not listen to them: ultimately, any narrative is impossible without a narratee. But often, themes that do not concern the narrative situation – or perhaps concern it only indirectly – reveal the positions of the narrator and the narratee in relations to each other. In Le Pére Goriot, the narrator maintains relations of power with his narratee. From the very beginning, the narrator tries to anticipate his narratee’s objections, to dominate him, and to convince him. All means are used: the narrator coaxes, entreats, threatens, derides, and in the final analysis we suspect that he succeeds in getting the better of his narratee. In the last  part of the novel, when Vautrin has been put in prison and Goriot is advancing more and more quickly toward death, the narrator rarely addresses his narratee. This is because the narrator has won the battle. He is now sure of his effects, of his domination, and he needs no longer do anything but recount the story. This sort of war, this desire for power, can be found at the level of the characters. On the level of the events as well as on the level of narration, the same struggle takes place.

If the narratee contributes to the thematic of a narrative, he is also always part of the narrative framework, often of a particularly concrete framework in which the narrator(s) and narratee(s) are all characters (Heart of Darkness, L’Immoraliste, The Decameron). The effect is to make the narrative seem more natural. The narratee like the narrator plays an undeniable verisimilating (vraisemblabilisant) role. Sometimes this concrete framework provides the model by which a work or narration develops. In  The Decameron or in L’Heptameron, it is expected that each of the narratees will in turn become a narrator. More than a mere sign of realism or an index of verisimilitude, the narratee represents in these circumstances an indispensable element for the development of the narrative.

… Finally, it sometimes happens that we must study the narratee in order to discover a narrative’s fundamental thrust. In La Chute, for example, it is only by studying the reactions of Clamence’s narratee that we can know whether the protagonist’s arguments are so powerful that they cannot be resisted, or whether, on the contrary, they constitute a skillful but unconvincing appeal. To be sure, the narratee doesn’t say a single word throughout the entire novel and we don’t even know if Clamence addresses himself on someone else; we only understand, from the narrator’s remarks, that his narratee, like himself, is a bourgeois, in his forties, a Parisian, familiar with Dante and the Bible, a lawyer… Nevertheless, this ambiguity emphasizing the essential duplicity of the protagonist’s world does not represent a problem for the reader who would wish to discover the way in which Clamence is judged in the novel: whatever the identity of the narratee may be, the only thing that counts is the extent of his agreement with the theses of the hero. The latter’s discourse shows evidence of a more and more intense resistance on the part of his interlocutor. Clamence’s tone becomes more insistent and his sentences more embarrassed as his narrative progresses and his narratee escapes him. Several times in the last part of the novel he even appears seriously shaken. If at the end of La Chute Clamence is not defeated, he certainly has not been triumphant. If his values and his vision of the world and men are not entirely false, neither are they incontestably true. There are perhaps other professions than that of judge-penitent and there are perhaps other acceptable ways to live than Clamence’s.

The narratee can, thus, exercise an entire series of functions in a narrative: he constitutes a relay between the narrator and the reader, he helps establish the narrative framework, he serves to characterize the narrator, he emphasizes certain themes, he contributes to the development of the plot, he becomes the spokesman for the moral of the work. Obviously, depending upon whether the narrator is skillful or inept, depending upon whether or not problems of narrative technique interest him, and depending upon whether or not his narrative requires it, the narratee will be more or less important, will play a greater or lesser number of roles, will be used in a way more or less subtle and original. Just as we study the narrator to evaluate the economy, the intentions, and the success of a narrative, so too we should examine the narratee in order to understand further and/or differently its mechanisms and significance.

The narratee is one of the fundamental elements of all narration. The thorough examination of what he represents, the study of a narrative work as constituted by a series of signals addressed to him, can lead to a more sharply delineated reading and a deeper characterization of the work. This study can lead also to a more precise typology of the narrative genre and a greater understanding of its evolution. It can provide a better appreciation of the way a narrative functions and a more accurate assessment of its success from a technical point of view. In the final analysis, the study of the narratee can lead us to a better understanding not only of the narrative genre but of all acts of communication.