To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Some fictions have explicit narrators, like Marcel in À la recherche du temps perdu, Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, or the unnamed first-person teller in Don Quixote. Explicit narrators are less common in fiction films, but there are some – the late Joe Gillis in Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, and Addison DeWitt in Mankiewicz’s 1952 film All About Eve. This chapter addresses the debate on whether there are covert fictional narrators in most or all fictions, which is assumed, for instance, in David Lewis’s account of truth in fiction. The chapter argues that many fictions, in literature, theater, and film, do have covert narrators, although they may well “fade into the background and have little or no significance for criticism or appreciation,” as Kendall Walton put it. Nevertheless, like Walton (and George Wilson), I reject their ubiquity. To that effect, the chapter relies on the constitutive-rules speech-act account of fictionality that was defended in Chapters 2 and 3 to elaborate on two distinctions suggested by Wilson, and to defend on that basis effaced fictional narrators, by developing his ‘silly question’ reply to skeptics’ arguments against covert narrators.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.