Narratee
Quick answer: Narratee explained: the person a story is told to inside the fiction, from Jane Eyre's reader to silent listeners, and how choosing one sharpens narration.
The narratee is the person or audience a narrator addresses: the figure to whom the story is told, inside the world of the telling. Every act of narration, in short, has a receiver as well as a sender, and the narratee is that receiver, whether named, implied, or entirely silent.
The term comes from narratology, coined in French by Gerald Prince and adopted wherever narrative is studied closely, but its value to working writers is immediate: deciding who is being told changes how a narrator selects, explains, confesses and lies. The narratee may be a character, a courtroom, a diary, a dead parent, or the famous reader of Victorian address.
Listeners you have already met
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre addresses a reader dozens of times, and that courteous, confided-in figure is a narratee: not you exactly, but a role the novel builds for you to occupy. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness gives Marlow a boatful of listeners whose comfortable assumptions his tale is designed to disturb; they are narratees with jobs, and their occasional restlessness on deck is part of the story's meaning.
The most extreme case is Albert Camus's The Fall, a novel that is one long monologue delivered in an Amsterdam bar to a listener who never speaks, yet whose implied questions, hesitations and eventual identity shape everything the narrator says. Dostoevsky's underground man argues with imagined gentlemen who scoff at him. Epistolary fiction makes the narratee structural: Celie's letters in The Color Purple are addressed first to God, then to her sister, and the change of addressee is the change in her life.
Why the receiver shapes the telling
Speech bends toward its listener, and narration is speech at scale. A narrator explaining events to a stranger must define terms a sibling would already know; a narrator confessing to a priest selects differently from one boasting in a pub. So the narratee silently governs diction, what gets explained, what gets hidden, and what the teller wants: absolution, admiration, belief, forgiveness. A story that feels oddly unfocused is often a story whose narrator is talking to no one in particular.
The device also creates dramatic tension of its own. When the narratee is a character, the telling becomes an act with stakes, Scheherazade's sultan being the limit case, a listener who must be kept listening on pain of death. When the narratee is implied, the reader triangulates: noticing what the narrator thinks needs justifying tells us who they imagine is judging them, which is characterisation of the finest grain.
Choosing a listener for your story
For any first-person draft, answer three questions: who is being told, why now, and what does the teller want from them? The answers need not appear on the page; they will still tune every sentence. A story recast from told to nobody to told to my daughter, the week before her own wedding changes register, selection and ending without a single plot alteration. Writers who resist outlining can treat the narratee as their compass: it steers voice the way plot outlines steer events.
The trap to avoid is the inconsistent listener: a narrator who explains the village to an outsider in chapter one and assumes intimate local knowledge in chapter three. Readers register the wobble as vagueness rather than error, which makes it hard to fix by instinct. Fix it by decision: write the narratee's name, even just implied stranger, at the top of the draft and audit against it.
The narratee among its relations
The narratee is not the reader: you hold the book, while the narratee lives at the level of the telling, a constructed role the text addresses. Nor is it the implied reader of criticism, which is the audience the whole work seems designed for; the narratee belongs to the narrator specifically. In Heart of Darkness you are not on the boat, but the men who are constitute Marlow's narratees while Conrad's implied reader watches the whole arrangement.
Neighbouring devices depend on the figure. Direct address and breaking the fourth wall are what happens when the narratee is acknowledged loudly; the epistolary form hard-codes narratees as recipients; second-person narration promotes the addressee into protagonist. And the frame narrative is largely a machine for staging narratees, giving the inner tale visible listeners whose reactions instruct our own.
What poets can take from this
- Decide who your narrator is talking to before polishing voice; the listener tunes the telling.
- Give the narratee a want or a judgement the narrator is responding to.
- Keep the assumed knowledge of the listener consistent from first page to last.
- Try recasting a flat draft toward a specific listener and compare the registers.
- Use a silent, characterised listener, as Camus does, when confession is the story's engine.
- Let what the narrator over-justifies reveal who they fear is judging them.
Try it yourself
Write a story told by a mechanic to the new apprentice on the boy's first morning, ostensibly about workshop safety, actually about the accident that killed the last apprentice. The apprentice never speaks, but his presence must visibly bend every sentence.
Questions
Is the narratee the same as the reader?
No. The reader is a real person outside the text; the narratee is the receiver constructed inside the telling, the you a narrator addresses or implies. Readers may be invited to occupy the narratee's chair, as in Jane Eyre, but the chair belongs to the fiction.
Does every story have a narratee?
Narratologists say yes: every act of narration implies a receiver, even when no listener is named and the address is neutral. The practical version for writers is that the narratee ranges from vivid, a named listener in the room, to minimal, an unmarked assumption of someone attending.
Who coined the term narratee?
The narratologist Gerald Prince introduced and developed the concept in the early 1970s, and it entered standard theory alongside Genette's work on narrative levels. The French original is narrataire.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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