Homodiegetic Narrator Analysis

John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman communicates the narrative of Charles and Sarah set in the Victorian Era, as narrated by a heterodiegetic narrator who shifts between first and third person narration. The heterodiegetic narrator is presented as an authorial persona who writes about the Victorian world presented in the novel, in the 1960s as made evident by the narrator’s use of first person narration as well as the self-reflexive elements of the narrative which outline the authorial persona’s story-writing and story-telling process. However, by the end of the novel, the heterodiegetic narrator transforms into a homodiegetic narrator when he appears within the confines of the Victorian world as the onlooker Charles meets on the train, and no longer on the periphery, extricated from the narrative. Similarly, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator is at first divorced from the fictional reality of Billy Pilgrim, he simply exists as an implied author in the frame narrative, outside of the embedded narrative of Billy Pilgrim. But by the end of the novel, the narrator becomes a part of the Billy Pilgrim’s fictional world when he brings to the readers’ attention that he is the American that Billy meets in the latrine. The fact that both the narrators in these texts ultimately become homodiegetic is significant because it emphasizes the narrator’s, and by extension the authorial persona’s (the narrators in both texts are the authorial personas of their