 So in real life we run into stories all the time and it's usually pretty easy to tell who the narrator is. Maybe your friend tells a story to explain why she got grounded. Okay, your friend is the narrator. She's the one narrating the story. Afterward, maybe your friend's grandfather sits you both down and tells a story from his childhood to teach you some valuable lesson. Who's the narrator? Easy, the grandfather. But what if the situations aren't so straightforward? What if your friend tells your grandfather's story? What if she makes her voice deep and husky like her grandfather's and starts using words like whippersnapper and jalopy? What if she even starts saying the things that happened to him happen to me? What if she did it on a stage for a talent show and it was also perfect that it didn't even seem like a joke? Or to take it a step further, what if she wrote it all down? In other words, what if she tells her grandfather's story while pretending to be her grandfather? Who's the narrator then? This is exactly the confusion many students run into when they read a story on the page. You know the author wrote the story, but is the author the one narrating it? In fiction, the answer is almost always no. The narrator is the fictional construct the author has created to tell the story through. It's the point of view the story is coming from. Think of it this way. In fiction, we like to let ourselves be tricked. We try to stop seeing our friend on the stage and focus on the performance. When that happens, it's like we're actually listening to the grandfather. And so when he says, I tied up that whippersnapper and threw him in the trunk of my jalopy, or whatever he says, we know it's the grandfather telling the story. He's the narrator. Your friend is just the person putting on the act. Well, it's the same with a book. In the novel to kill a mockingbird, for example, Harper Lee is the author. She's the one putting on the act. Part of her performance is to tell the story using the voice and perspective of one of the characters, a little girl named Scout. So when the novel states, I told Atticus I didn't feel very well and didn't think I'd go to school anymore if it was all right with him, we know that Scout speaking. Scout is the narrator. She's the one narrating the story. Now let me ask you a question. Say a little girl comes up to you six or seven years old and starts telling you a story about the maniac who lives across the street. She says he's six and a half feet tall and dines on raw squirrels and cats, which is why his hands, by the way, are always bloodstained because if you eat a raw animal, you can never wash the blood off. Oh, and when people's flowers freeze during cold weather, it's because this man has snuck out at night to breathe on them. You believe her? Probably not, unless you're six or seven yourself, in which case the obvious response is to go peeking his windows. For the rest of us, the story shows us more about how the little girl's mind works than it does about her neighbor. The same is true in a written story. We don't trust the narrator, Scout, to interpret everything correctly. But we do trust the author, Harper Lee, to show us Scout interpreting things incorrectly, like she does with these descriptions of Boo Radley. It's all just part of Harper Lee's act, and she gives a virtuoso performance. And it's one of the reasons why distinguishing between the author and the narrator is so important in understanding how to interpret a story.