narrator

A person who tells a story, or a voice fashioned by an author to recount a narrative. See also:

• Narration
• Point of View

Observations:

• "[S]imple, direct storytelling is so common and habitual that we do it without planning in advance. The narrator (or teller) of such a personal experience is the speaker, the one who was there. . . . The telling is usually subjective, with details and language chosen to express the writer's feelings. . . .
  
  "When a story isn't your own experience but a recital of someone else's, or of events that are public knowledge, then you proceed differently as narrator. Without expressing opinions, you step back and report, content to stay invisible. Instead of saying, 'I did this; I did that,' you use the third person, he, she, it, or they. . . . Generally, a nonparticipant is objective in setting forth events, unbiased, as accurate and dispassionate as possible."
  (X.J. Kennedy, D. Kennedy, and J. E. Aaron, The Bedford Reader, St. Martin's, 2000)



• "The term 'narrator' can be used in both a broad and a narrow sense. The broad sense is 'one who tells a story,' whether that person is real or imagined; this is the sense given in most dictionary definitions. Literary scholars, however, by 'narrator' often mean a purely imaginative person, a voice emerging from a text to tell a story. . . . Narrators of this kind include omniscient narrators, that is, narrators not only who are imaginary but who exceed normal human capabilities in their knowledge of events."
  (Elspeth Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator, Univ. of Toronto Press, 2007)



• "It is well known that in linguistic communication I and you are absolutely presupposed one by the other; likewise, there can be no story without a narrator and without an audience (or reader)."
  (Roland Barthes, "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative," 1966)