To understand what the narrative voice is, we must understand what the concept of narrative refers to. A narrative is the process and result of telling something: thus, it could be a story or a novel, for example.
The person who, in the story in question, recounts the events that occurred, acts as the narrator. It is important to keep in mind that the narrator is not the author of the work: whoever writes a story also invents a narrator, who is the one who “tells” the story in the text. The narrative voice, in this painting, is the voice of this narrator. Through his voice, the narrator can lead and be part of the events, or be just a witness who recounts the events, but does not participate in the development of the story.
In a broad sense, it is possible to differentiate three types of narrative voice from the point of view of grammar: in the first person (the story is told from the perspective of an I), in the second person (it attracts a “you”) or in the third person (“he”). It is important to know, in addition to all the above, another important series of data in relation to the narrative voice, such as the following:
– In literary works there may be only one voice of this type or even several.
-The usual thing is that these works have a single narrative voice, but, throughout history, we find many books where there are different ones. An example of the latter would be the novel “Pedro Páramo” by Juan Rulfo. Regarding the participation of the narrative voice in the story, the homodiegetic narrative voice is the one that narrates from within the story, and may or may not correspond to the protagonist. The autodiegetic narrative voice, on the other hand, corresponds to the central character and participates in the events. Finally, the extradiegetic narrative voice is located outside the narration. Continuing with the case of the extradiegetic narrative voice, the narrator, because he is not situated within the story, can be equiscient (he knows the same as one of the characters), deficient (he has less knowledge than the characters) or omniscient (he knows everything about the character (the story, even more than the protagonists). Not only in literature, we find narrative voices. We can also find them in television series and even in movies. A clear example of this is the Spanish series “Tell me how it happened “, which reviews the life of a family, Alcántara, in recent decades. Each of the chapters of this production, one of the longest on the small screen in the country with eighteen seasons, begins with the voice of a narrator. In Specifically, it is the adult voice of one of the protagonists of the series, the third son of the family, Carlos, and this is the one in charge of entering each chapter of one of the adventures, adventures or events that happened to your parents, your grandmother, your siblings, your friends, your neighbors in the San Genaro neighborhood or yourself.
The character is played by the young actor Ricardo Gómez, but the narrative voice of an adult is provided by the also famous interpreter Carlos Hipólito.
