1. Who’s Telling the Story?
The Narrator
Who’s Telling the Story?

2. I can… I can differentiate between the author and the narrator.
I can analyze the role of the narrator in a story and how changing the narrator changes the story.
I can use evidence to prove that a character is an unreliable or reliable narrator.

3. Standards
Analyze the narration and point of view (e.g., first person, third-person objective, third-person limited, third-person omniscient) in complex literary texts, in which the narrator and point of view may shift with multiple characters acting as narrators and/or with some characters serving as unreliable narrators.

4. Agenda 1st half 2nd half Foreign words Finish Presentations
Reliable and Unreliable Narrator
Group Work: The Big Questions
2nd half
Independent Practice: Read chapters Choose one scene from the novel and rewrite it as if it were in the point of view of another character. ie: Jem, Dill, Atticus, Calpurnia, etc.

5. Narrator The person who tells the story to the audience.
Types of Narrators
1st person Innocent Eye
2nd person Multiple Narrators
3rd person Unreliable Narrator
omniscient
limited omniscient
Objective

6. The NARRATOR can be, but is seldom the AUTHOR .
REMEMBER
The NARRATOR can be, but is seldom the AUTHOR .

7. Innocent Eye
The story is told through the eyes of a child (his/her judgment being different from that of an adult).

8. Unreliable Narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised.
You can’t trust the unreliable narrator!!!

9. Reliable or Unreliable?
Look for direct and indirect characterization
Look for prejudices in speech and thoughts.
Examine religion, gender, race and age.
Is the narrator telling you everything he or she knows?
Is the narrator mentally stable?
Does he or she know what he or she is talking about?
Does this person have the authority to relate the events? Did he or she experience them from someone else or did he or she experience them first hand?
Why is the narrator telling the story? Confession? Bragging? To reveal a moral? (This is not a reflection of why the AUTHOR told the story, but why the CHARACTER is telling the story.)

10. The Big Question
Is Scout an unreliable narrator? Don’t forget to support your answer with evidence from the text.

11. Some more interesting questions…
Why might Harper Lee tell the story from an adult perspective, narrated many years after the fact?
In the first seven chapters, can you find statements that remind us of an adult point of view? Or does the adult narrator enter completely into the world of her childhood?
How would this story be narrated, in the third person, from the point of view of Dill’s fabulous imagination?

12. Independent Practice
Read chapters 8-10.
Choose one scene from the novel and rewrite it as if it were in the point of view of another character. ie: Jem, Dill, Atticus, Calpurnia, etc.

13. Closure
Journal: In your opinion, what personal traits would make a narrator unreliable?