For the Ubiquity of Nonactual Fact-Telling Narrators
Peter Alward · Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism · 2007
>Andrew Kania has recently developed an argument that poses a serious challenge to the “ubiquity thesis”—the view that every literary narrative necessarily has a fictional narrator.1 Kania characterizes a fictional narrator as a (possibly nonhuman) agent who tells (or is responsible for) the narrative and who exists on “the same ontological level” as the characters and events described by the narrative.2 Kania's central claim is that there are numerous nonperipheral examples of literary narratives—in particular, those written in a “plain third‐person omniscient narrative style”—for which there is no reason to believe they have fictional narrators.3 Kania defends this claim by arguing that the central reason for thinking such works have fictional narrators—the ontological gap argument—does not establish any such thing. As Kania reconstructs it, the ontological gap argument has a positive and a negative stage. The positive stage consists of the claims (1) that understanding a literary narrative requires an account of how we (the readers) acquire information about the fictional world it describes and (2) that the only adequate account is one according to which this information is provided to us by an agent of some kind. The negative stage consists of the argument that this agent must be a fictional narrator because otherwise he or she would not be related cognitively to the characters and events in the story so as to be able to coherently provide us with information about them “as if they were real.”4