Reader Figures in Narrative

Various concepts of the reader have gained currency in recent literary criticism and theory. This fact is largely due to the re-evaluation of the role of the real reader. Reception theorists like H. R. Jauss stress that subjective reader responses are historically conditioned. By contrast, Wolfgang Iser focuses on the interaction between text and reader and discusses how readers become, as it were, co-producers of a literary work in that they integrate the elements and perspectives offered by a work of prose fiction. Poststructuralist critics, who, in the United States, are much indebted to the New Critical emphasis on text-internal ambiguities, on the other hand, privilege readers who produce different interpretations and keep the text open to new readings. Given this context, it is small wonder that reader figures (both intradiegetic and extradiegetic) used by authors in narratives to control the reactions of the real reader have so far been relatively neglected. That such figures and other means of directing the audience deserve more attention becomes evident when we consider the peculiar contractual relationship between author and reader which is created in the act of reading. Such a contract does not one-sidedly favor the reader (or listener) of a story, as can be illustrated by the narrative frame of Arabian Nights. Once Scheherazade begins to tell a story, her listener may have the power to terminate her storytelling; but if he continues to listen, he allows the narrator to live, as it were. Scheherazade dominates the scene and forces her listener to respond to her story and, to use an old-fashioned expression, to fall under its spell (see also Prince, Notes toward a Categorization 103-04). In the following essay I discuss two types of reader figures, the fictive (extradiegetic) and the fictional (intradiegetic) reader. I owe much to studies by Rolf Fieguth, Gerald Prince, W. Daniel Wilson, and others, but I move beyond them by distinguishing between reader figures on the level of the narrator and those on the level of the action, and by relating these figures to other concepts of readers, narrators, and authors. (1) Reader Figures In order to define these reader figures more closely, a communicative model will be used that does justice to the kinds of relationship that narratives establish between writers and their audience. (2) On the first level of communication, the author and the reader as real-life persons can be distinguished, while on the second level the author as the creator of a work of prose fiction and the reader as a prospective consumer of the narrative text can be differentiated. On both these levels various factors influence writers' narrative decisions: their estimation of the market situation and of contemporary taste, their choice of genre, their need to formulate their experiences, imaginings, and opinions in a way which their audience will find plausible, etc. Readers, likewise, are influenced by external factors on both levels of communication. Private experiences, individual habits of reading, knowledge of other works by one and the same author, the sales campaign for the book conducted by the publisher, first reactions by critics, and a host of other factors raise certain expectations and influence readers' reception of the book in question. On a third level of communication--the first one constituted in the narrative text itself--the implied author can be distinguished from the implied reader. According to Wayne Booth, the implied author is that part of the author's self which is realized in the story: this second self differs from the author as a private person and a producer of texts as well as from the implied authors in other works created by the same writer. implied author is responsible for the text as a whole, including the narrator and the implied reader: (3) The author creates, in short, an image of himself and another image of his reader; he makes his reader, as he makes his second self [. …