Yes, I very much regret the loss of the narrator in modern fiction. And I sometimes get quite bemused comments from some of the readers of my books when the find the voice of the narrator present. The phenomenon of the missing narrator is something I plan to write about myself at some length, but my main thought is that it is a consequence of postmodernism.
The narrator in a story is essentially the voice of objectivity. Much of the drama of a story, the moral drama in particular, lies in the gap between the objective reality of the story world and the subjective experience of the characters. The voice of the narrator anchors the objective side of this contrast. Removing it leaves the subjective experience of the characters to float free. This robs the story of an important source of drama.
Postmodernism, of course, denies the possibility of the objective. All is subjective, and so the experience of the protagonist is the only reality. This, I think, is why we get so many close third-person and first-person narratives. They are purely subjective narratives.
Some hint of the objective may sneak in through the reader's suspicion that they are dealing with an unreliable narrator, which can be used to good effect. But this does not give a work the clear objective stance of a distinct narrative voice. It does more to undermine the authenticity of the protagonist's subjective experience than to establish a true objective baseline for the story.
Yes, I very much regret the loss of the narrator in modern fiction. And I sometimes get quite bemused comments from some of the readers of my books when the find the voice of the narrator present. The phenomenon of the missing narrator is something I plan to write about myself at some length, but my main thought is that it is a consequence of postmodernism.
The narrator in a story is essentially the voice of objectivity. Much of the drama of a story, the moral drama in particular, lies in the gap between the objective reality of the story world and the subjective experience of the characters. The voice of the narrator anchors the objective side of this contrast. Removing it leaves the subjective experience of the characters to float free. This robs the story of an important source of drama.
Postmodernism, of course, denies the possibility of the objective. All is subjective, and so the experience of the protagonist is the only reality. This, I think, is why we get so many close third-person and first-person narratives. They are purely subjective narratives.
Some hint of the objective may sneak in through the reader's suspicion that they are dealing with an unreliable narrator, which can be used to good effect. But this does not give a work the clear objective stance of a distinct narrative voice. It does more to undermine the authenticity of the protagonist's subjective experience than to establish a true objective baseline for the story.
A good recent example of an objective narrator is the one in Min Jin Lee's "Pachinko." Here is an interview in which Lee discusses the importance of the objective, third-person-omniscient narrator in her own work: https://themillions.com/2023/09/min-jin-lee-still-believes-in-truth.html