Teller-Characters and Reflector-Characters in Narrative Theory

The theory of narrative which I have presented in Theorie des Erziihlens' and from which the following is an extract (mainly of chapter six) concentrates on the process of narrative transmission. It is based on the assumption that mediacy (Mittelbarkeit) is the generic characteristic that distinguishes narrative from drama, poetry and, as a rule, also from film. Being a complex generic phenomenon, mediacy has to be analyzed on the basis of its chief constitutive elements. These are presented in the form of the following oppositions of distinctive features: identity and non-identity of the realism of the fictional characters and of the narrator (first-/third-person narration); internal and external perspective (limited point of view/omniscience); teller-character and reflector-character as agents of transmission (telling/showing). The structural significance of these basic oppositions emerges from the observation that a transformation of a narrative text determined by one pole of one of these oppositions into a text dominated by its opposite elements usually alters the meaning of the narrative. In this way the central chapters of the Theorie attempt a verification of the structural significance of these oppositions. Illustrations are drawn mainly from English, American and German novels, ranging from DeFoe, Sterne, and Goethe, to Thomas Mann, Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett, M. Frisch, and Vonnegut. In the teller/reflector opposition we perceive two contrary manifestations of mediacy of presentation, the generic characteristic of all narrative: on the one hand overt mediacy, when the process of narrative transmission becomes part of the thematic texture of the story; and on the other hand covert or dissimulated mediacy, which produces in the reader the illusion of immediacy of presentation. Almost all narrative texts, a few shorter stories excepted, oscillate