The ongoing birth of the narrator: empirical evidence for the emergence of the author–narrator distinction in literary criticism

Abstract This article explores the historical evolution of the distinction between author and narrator in German-language literary criticism, an area largely unexplored by quantitative methods. While narratologists often distinguish between a fictional narrator and the author, the practical adoption of this distinction by readers remains under-examined. We hypothesize a semantic shift in the term ‘narrator’ from referring to the actual author to a fictive entity imagined by readers, indicative of modern fiction practices. Our methodology combines manual annotation with computational analysis of historical periodicals (1841–2018) to track this semantic change. We manually annotated instances of ‘narrator’ (germ. ‘Erzähler’) differentiating four different word senses: oral narrator, author of a narrative, fictive heterodiegetic narrator, and fictive homodiegetic narrator. We train different BERT models to recognize and visualize these word senses. Finally, we employ cross-validated models in a diachronic large-scale analysis, finding that the term ‘narrator’ gradually changed its meaning from denoting the actual author of a narrative to meaning a fictive entity that the reader of fiction has to imagine. There are two surprising observations: First, this change is still ongoing and second, it is mainly driven by the increase of the homodiegetic narrator word sense, rather than by the word sense that narratologists attach particular importance to—‘fictive heterodiegetic narrator’—which is even after the year 2000 much less frequent than other word senses.