Other forms: narrators
The narrator is the voice telling the story. In a book it is whoever says "I", or the unseen voice describing what happens; in a nature programme it is the calm voice over the pictures of penguins.
A first-person narrator is a character inside the story, telling it as "I"; a third-person narrator stands outside and reports that she walked to the door. An unreliable narrator is one you slowly work out you cannot trust, and it is a favourite trick of novels and films. In audio, the narrator is the person who reads the book aloud, and a good one sells the audiobook on their voice alone. Do not confuse the narrator with the author: the author wrote the book, the narrator is the voice inside it, and the two are not the same person. The verb is narrate and the telling itself is the narration.
1nounnarratorThe voice or character that tells a story.
“The narrator turns out to have been lying to us for two hundred pages.”
2nounreadsA person who reads a text aloud for a film, a programme or an audiobook.
“They hired a narrator with a soft Yorkshire accent.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
narrator is a storytelling role.
Narrator is narrate plus -or, the ending that names the doer — the same shape as actor and editor. Behind it stands Latin narrātor, built the same way from narrāre. The word arrived in English already meaning the one who tells.
Latin
narrātor
English, today
narrator
From narrate + -or, from Latin narrātor. by surface analysis, narr- + -ate + -or.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA