Dramatized Narrative Audiences

Before the explosion of reader-response criticism in the last twenty years, Gerald Prince was able to suggest that critics have largely neglected the narrate in literature in order to concentrate on the narrator, perhaps because the hero of numerous novels and tales is himself a writer, a narrator…., whereas there has never been a hero who is primarily a reader or a listener, at least not to my knowledge.1 Clearly, the activity of a fiction, unlike the activity been dramatized or implied by works of literature, these narrates generally provide a frame for the narrative or an occasion that makes the tale possible, as for example, the pilgrims function in The Canterbury Tales, or the caliph in the Arabian Nights. Their activity as narrates is always secondary to the tale itself. Even in works like Wuthering Heights or Heart of Darkness, in which the auditors are clearly affected by the tale, their responses either help to establish the reality of the tale (as Lockwood does) or provide a clue about how the real reader is to respond.