American Literature / Unit 2 AML 0130 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Telling Narrator From Author
The idea
Prose questions punish readers who take the narrator for the writer, and three checks prevent it. First, ask whether the narrator is a character in the story, because a first-person narrator always is, and a character has interests. Second, ask whether the details support the narrator's account; when a narrator's confidence outruns the evidence, the author is arranging a gap on purpose. Third, in third-person passages, watch for sentences that borrow a character's vocabulary without quotation marks, because free indirect discourse puts the character's view into the narrator's grammar and a reader who misses it attributes an opinion to the book that belongs to a person in it.
In practice
Is the teller in the story, and do the details agree?
Where people slip
The question asks what the narrator believes, or what the passage shows, and those differ often enough that the exam builds distractors from the gap.
Your place on the trail
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