All 35 Uses

narrator
in
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
(Edited)

The late Raymond Carver wrote a story, "Cathedral" (1981), about a guy with real hang-ups: included among the many things the narrator is bigoted against are people with disabilities, minorities, those different from himself, and all parts of his wife's past in which he does not share.
Chpt 2

narrator = a character in a story who tells the story to the reader
When our unnamed narrator reveals to us from the first moment that a blind man, a friend of his wife's, is coming to visit, we're not surprised that he doesn't like the prospect at all.
Chpt 2
To do that, they have to touch, hold hands even, and there's no way the narrator would have been able to do that at the start of the story.
Chpt 2
When the narrator watches the blind man eating—competent, busy, hungry, and, well, normal—he begins to gain a new respect for him.
Chpt 2
The three of them, husband, wife, and visitor, ravenously consume the meat loaf, potatoes, and vegetables, and in the course of that experience our narrator finds his antipathy toward the blind man beginning to break down.
Chpt 2
In any case, the alcohol at supper and the marijuana after combine to relax the narrator so he can receive the full force of his insight, so he can share in the drawing of a cathedral (which, incidentally, is a place of communion).
Chpt 2
Being in early adolescence, the narrator has no way of dealing with the object of his desire, or even the wherewithal to recognize what he feels as desire.
Chpt 7 *
In Eudora Welty's masterful story Why I Live at the P.O. (1941), the narrator is engaged in a sibling rivalry with her younger sister, who has come home after leaving under suspicious if not actually disgraceful circumstances.
Chpt 7
The narrator, Sister, is outraged at having to cook two chickens to feed five people and a small child just because her "spoiled" sister has come home.
Chpt 7
At the end of James Baldwin's story Sonny's Blues (1957), the narrator sends a drink up to the bandstand as a gesture of solidarity and acceptance to his brilliantly talented but wayward brother, Sonny, who takes a sip and, as he launches into the next song, sets the drink on the piano, where it shimmers "like the very cup of trembling."
Chpt 7
It helps that I know that Baldwin was a preacher's son, that his most famous novel is called Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), that the story already displays a strong Cain-and-Abel element when the narrator initially denies his responsibility toward Sonny, so my scriptural hunch was pretty strong.
Chpt 7
The narrator narrowly escapes before the house itself pulls apart and crashes into the "black and lurid tarn" at its base.
Chpt 13
His ostensible narrator, Diedrich Knickerbocker, is a jolly companion who spins out these tales of his Dutch ancestors without seeing all the implications.
Chpt 13
Soon the deed is done and he lies spent beside her, at which point the narrator points out that "precisely ninety seconds" have elapsed since he walked from her to look into the bedroom.
Chpt 17

narrator = storyteller
In her last novel, Wise Children, when the main character and narrator, Dora Chance, engages in sex, the aim is usually self-expression or exertion of control over her life.
Chpt 17

narrator = a character in a story who tells the story to the reader
In Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator spends the opening pages describing a landscape and a day as bleak as any in literature.
Chpt 19
In Barbara Kingsolver's Bean Trees (1988), the main character and narrator reaches late adolescence in rural Kentucky and realizes she has no options in that world.
Chpt 19
The narrator feels her figurative horizons are also circumscribed by what seem like local certainties: early pregnancy and an unsatisfactory marriage to a man who will probably die young.
Chpt 19
Darley, the narrator of the first and fourth volumes, tells us that there are at least five genders (although he leaves specifying them to our imaginations) in Alexandria, then shows them to us at full throttle.
Chpt 19
In Heart of Darkness (1899), the narrator, Marlow, travels up the Congo River and observes the near-total disintegration of the European psyche in Kurtz, who has been in-country so long that he has become unrecognizable.
Chpt 19
The first line tells us that the street the young narrator lives on is "blind."
Chpt 22
Its narrator is more fallible, more consistently clueless, than any narrator you're ever likely to meet in all of fiction; at the same time he's completely believable and therefore pathetic.
Chpt 23
Its narrator is more fallible, more consistently clueless, than any narrator you're ever likely to meet in all of fiction; at the same time he's completely believable and therefore pathetic.
Chpt 23
The very next comment by Marlow, the narrator, is that Jim was "inscrutable at heart."
Chpt 23
At the beginning of James Joyce's wonderful story The Sisters (1914), the unnamed young narrator mentions that his old friend and mentor, a priest, is dying.
Chpt 24
When, in the course of Justine, the first novel of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, the narrator's lover, Melissa, succumbs to tuberculosis, he means something very different from what Ibsen means.
Chpt 24
Poverty, neglect, abuse, exploitation have all combined to grind her down, and the grinding nature of her illness—and of Darley's (the narrator's) inability to save her or even to recognize his responsibilities to her—stands as the physical expression of the way life and men have quite literally used her up.
Chpt 24
At the end of the story there's a scene we looked at in an earlier chapter, where the brother, Sonny, has returned to playing in a club and the math teacher, our narrator, goes to hear him for the first time ever.
Chpt 25
The point of view (the brother's), the depth of detail about the brother's life relative to Sonny's, the direct access to the brother's thoughts, all remind us this is about the narrator and not the jazzman.
Chpt 25
When the narrator's daughter dies and Sonny writes a caring letter of sympathy, he makes the narrator (I'm sorry he doesn't have a name) feel even greater guilt.
Chpt 25
When the narrator's daughter dies and Sonny writes a caring letter of sympathy, he makes the narrator (I'm sorry he doesn't have a name) feel even greater guilt.
Chpt 25
Now that Sonny is out of prison and not using heroin, the narrator has a chance to get to know his younger, troubled brother as he never has before.
Chpt 25
In fact (such is the heartlessness of authors), for the question to really matter to us in terms of the narrator, Sonny's own future must be very cloudy.
Chpt 25
Our doubts on his behalf add to the urgency of the narrator's growth; anyone can love and understand a reformed junkie, but one who may not be reformed, who admits the perils are still there for him, offers real difficulties.
Chpt 25
Sonny's trouble is interesting, of course, but it's merely the hook to draw us in; the real issues the story raises all concern the narrator/brother.
Chpt 25

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Highlighting 2 Senses of the Word

Definitions:

(1) (narrator)
someone who tells a story--especially the main voice in a documentary, or a character who talks directly to the audience in a movie, play or other performance
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)

narrator in How to Read Literature Like a Professor (Edited)

narrator
in
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
(Edited)