Who is really telling you the story when you read a novel?

A narrator, which is never quite the same thing as the author. Every written story is told by a narrator, a voice that the author builds to deliver the plot to you. Sometimes that voice is a character with a name and opinions, sometimes it is an unnamed presence, and sometimes the author turns up as a character in their own tale. Critics treat narration as two questions at once: who tells the story, and how it is told.

The simplest choice is the pronoun. A first-person narrator says "I" and takes part in the events. A third-person narrator calls everyone he, she or they and never says "I". Third person then splits in two. An omniscient narrator sees everything, including what every character is thinking and feeling, and Dickens, Tolstoy and George Eliot used that all-seeing voice a lot. A limited, or close, third-person narrator stays glued to one character's perspective, as in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.

Picking a narrator is picking what you are allowed to know. Take Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë does not simply tell you Heathcliff's story. Most of it is told by the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to a man called Lockwood, and the book has five or six narrators in all. Critics have noted that Lockwood is a bit of a snob and that Nelly's account is shaped by her own biases.

So when you open a novel, ask a small question first: who is speaking, and how do they know all this?