Abstract：For (at least) literary narratives I propose to understand “narrator” as follows: An inner-textual speech position from which the current narrative discourse as a whole originates, and from which references to the entities, actions and events that this discourse is about are being made. Through a dual process of metonymic transfer and anthropomorphisation the term “narrator” is then employed to designate a presumed occupant of this position, the hypothesized producer of the current discourse. A narrator is a linguistically indicated, textually projected and readerly identified position whose occupant needs to be thought of primarily in terms of a communicative role, distinct from any actualworld flesh-and-blood (or computer) producer of the text. The paper describes in brief eight different kinds of general considerations (linguistic, philosophical, methodological and general literary-theoretical) which can motivate a narratologist to judge the narrator category/instance as an indispensable or as a merely optional element of his general model of literary narrative. The article concludes with two recent theoretical moves which tend to circumvent the need for such a choice by either re-drawing the narratologist’s domain of objects or by redefining the status of the narrator category itself.
2011, Vol. 1 
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