Role of narrative ve voice in a fiction

Every work of fictions has several essential elements; characters, plot, setting, point of view. Among them, point of view and characters are exposed to readers directly by narrator and characters description respectively. Especially, narrative voice plays significant roles in shaping a reader’s attitude toward a story. Imagine a story in which only characters’ description leads a plot. It’s scarcely possible to develop a story without narrator. Amongst narrators’ roles, two significant functions exist; developing a story, and another is describing characters, places, in a story with several technics, such as tone, point of view. In order to experience the significance of narrator voice, detailed functions are supposed to be explained based on a novel W.S. by author Hartley. This story starts with a post card sent to a main character as well as author Walter Streeter by anonymous person. He started with curiosity about the post card gets scared through series of post cards. But eventually, Streeter is killed by the sender of the post card, who is a doppelganger Streeter described him as a wicked person in his novel in the past. In terms of the former role of narrator that mentioned above, it introduces readers events, Streeter’s status, emotional change by which author develop the story in a dry or uninvolved narrator tone. In respect to the latter role, on the other hand, it draws readers in specific atmosphere that author Hartley intends and gives readers room to imagine events in reader’s own way. In this case, author uses a variety of tones. This story is filled of curiosity, tense and serious interest in its characters and events, which is a result of narrator playing its role effectively. Following examples show how those functions play in detail.

First, narrator develops a story which is its primary role. In other words, It simply puts a sequence of events. In this case, the story proceeds with Streeter’s emotional changes. What it means is the story is going to climax according to Streeter’s emotional change from curiosity to fear. We need to focus on following sentences that narrator mentions in the beginning of story. The narrator is expressing how Streeter thinks about the post card when he got it at first time. “he(Streeter) was used to getting communications from strangers. (Hartely,21), “he was rather relieved that W.S had given no address. The photograph of Forfar was uninteresting and he tore it up.” Through those narrative voice, author draws readers in expectation that he doesn’t have any interest on the post card. However, narrator starts telling Streeter’s emotional change that “his anonymous correspondents’ criticism, however, lingered in his mind. (Hartley, 21). Although he usually deals with it trivial, he feels unusual which give a clue for readers something will happen with that post card. It’s a narrator’s role that links emotional change, and makes readers focus on the post card with interest. Unsurprisingly, Streeter’s concerning on the post card is getting more intense as the story proceeds. “Walter Streeter pondered over this and began to wonder about the sender” (Hartley, 22), a wave of panic surged up in Walter Streeter, he now had to admit to himself that the postcard business had become a leading factor in his life. (Hartley, 24). By keeping mentioning Streeter’ thoughts, the narrator leads a story towards climax, making readers stay focusing on the event. Therefore, those narrative voices are very meaningful in terms of developing the story by giving notice character’ thoughts to the readers.

     In addition, narrative voice creates certain impression that author intends to the reader. In a same story, for example, a policeman came by Streeter’s house. But, after few minutes, Streeter realizes he is not a policeman, but just a guy who disguises himself as a police man. Following narrative voice shows how its extremely tense situation with single sentence: there was a pause “But, said Walter, you did send someone. (Real police officer:) No, Mr. Streeter, I’m afraid we didn’t. (Streeter:) But, there’s a policeman here, in this very house. “There was a pause.” (Hartley, 29) Although narrator doesn’t express how the atmosphere looks like, readers are shocked and get scared in the paused situation. Through narrative voice in dark tone, author shows certain atmosphere to the readers. Even if author doesn’t mention about situation, specific feeling, we readers can conceive what is going on sensibly.

In a nutshell, narrative voice can have strong effect on readers. Every sentence in a fiction have specific intends that author want to represent and those intends are performed by narrator with several tones. In other words, for the purpose of introducing characters, places, events, author usually uses dry, uninvolved voice tone. On the other hand, serious or ironic, sad or happy narrative voice tone are used in order to express detailed attitude to the readers. Thereby, readers are able to bring the depth of each character as well as events in a way author intends to convey.