What is narrator? Narrator is the voice the author creates to tell the story.
The possible ways of telling a story are many, and more than one way can be
worked into a single story. Conventionally, the various narrators that
storytellers draw upon can be grouped into four broad groups: the third-person
narrator, the first-person narrator, the omniscient narrator and the witness
narrator. After reading William Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" ,Edora
Welty's "A Worn Path", Richard Wright's "The Man Who Was Almost A
Man" and Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall",
I want to discuss what type of the narrative voice the four writers create in
their own stories. A witness narrator is who tells only what they see or hear
through their perspectives. For example, in William Faulkner's "A Rose for
Emily" which is about an insane woman who kills her man and sleeps with the
dead man for ten years, I can find that there is an example of witness narrator.
The author, William Faulkner, uses the Jefferson town people as witness to
create the town's view about Emily. After the town noticed there was a stinky
smell from Miss Grierson house , they asked Judge Stevens to "send her word
to stop it"( Faulkner,337). The town people discussed about the stinky
smell from Emily 's house, they were the observers. A first-person narrator is
when the narrator speaks using "I" or "We" pronouns. We can
see such first-person narrator in both "A Rose For Emily" and "
The Man Who Was Almost A Man". Faulkner uses the town people as observers
in "A Rose For Emily" but his we, though plural and representative if
the town's view of Emily, is definitely a first-person narrator. Just as in the
article where it says "We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she
had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father driven away, and we
knew…"(338).