The narrator may merely relate the story to the audience without being involved in the plot and may have varied awareness of characters' thoughts and distant events. The narrator may be anonymous and unspecified, or a character appearing and participating within their own story (whether fictitious or factual), or the author themself as a character. Thus, narration includes both who tells the story and how the story is told (for example, by using stream of consciousness or unreliable narration).

Narrative technique: any of the various other methods chosen to help narrate a story, such as establishing the story's setting (location in time and space), developing characters, exploring themes (main ideas or topics), structuring the plot, intentionally expressing certain details but not others, following or subverting genre norms, and using various other storytelling devices and linguistic styles.

Narrative tense: the choice of either the past or present grammatical tense to establish either the prior completion or current immediacy of the plot.

Narrative point of view, perspective, or voice: the choice of grammatical person used by the narrator to establish the whether or not the narrator and the audience are participants in the story also, this includes the scope of the information or knowledge that the narrator presents.

The narrative mode encompasses the set of choices through which the creator of the story develops their narrator and narration: However, narration is merely optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows, and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action. Narration is a required element of all written stories ( novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, etc.), with the function of conveying the story in its entirety. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story, to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot (the series of events). Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience.

For other uses, see Narrator (disambiguation).

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