The Search for Narrator in Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and The Rose

Abstract

The study is based on a search for narrator in Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and The Rose”. In the notion of modern narratology, narrator is one of the most important divisions in the structure of narrative. It refers to the “the entire set of ways in which a story is actually told” (Herman & Vervaeck, 2005, p. 80). It can be explained more that the narration is actually the voice or the source that tells the story. Further, the narrator is the actual figure that tells the story in a narrative. It can be said that the narrator puts the events or the happening into words and tells the reader how an event takes place, what is the setting or the background view, who is the character and how that character looks or behaves. The study explores the various types and properties of narrators and justifies that the narrator is an important in the story or novel. Further the study is based on the qualitative method of research that is considered very suitable for the analysis of various literary texts and involves the interpretative method that is considered to be the proper method for the literary texts. In this research study, the researchers have searched for the narrator in the Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Nightingale and the Rose.” For this analysis, they have adopted the method from Herman & Vervaeck’s (2005) book Handbook of narrative analysis. This method involves the search for narrator on two grounds i.e. temporal relations which the time of narration and the time when actually the event takes place and the visibility of narrator in which character acts either ‘covertly’ or ‘overtly’.