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Quote :A Theory of Narrative
Whenever a piece of news is conveyed, whenever something is reported, there is a mediator—the voice of a narrator is audible. I term this phenomenon "mediacy" (Mittelbarkeit). Mediacy is the generic characteristic which distinguishes narration from other forms of literary art. […] It is characteristic of the first-person narrative situation that the mediacy of the narration belongs totally to the fictional realm of the characters of the novel […] It is characteristic of the authorial narrative situation that the narrator is outside the world of the characters. […] Finally, in the figural narrative situation the mediating narrator is replaced by a reflector: a character in the novel who thinks, feels and perceives, but does not speak to the reader like a narrator. […] The mediacy of narration thus forms the basis for the distinction among the three narrative situations in such a way that in each narrative situation a different element (person, perspective, mode) of the mediacy complex is dominant.
One of the main questions that we need to ask when analyzing a narrative is whose perspective we're getting. Stanzel calls this the "narrative situation" and summarizes three different types of narrative situation that are available.
The first-person narrative situation is when you've got a narrator who is part of the world presented within the text (the "narrating I"). The authorial narrative situation is when you've got a narrator who is outside the story world. The figural narrative situation, finally, is when you don't have a narrator but rather a "reflector": a character who doesn't talk to you directly but whose perpective filters everything (you know how that specific character thinks and feels).
For Stanzel, it's "mediacy" that's at the core of these narrative situations, giving each one its own flavor. Stanzel argues that it's mediacy that sets narration apart from other sorts of texts, its role being to shape our relationship with whatever narrative we're reading. Mediacy has to do how close or detached the narrator is from what's going on in the fictional world—is the narraotor right there in the thick of it, or is the narrator commenting as an outsider? And is the narrator speaking directly to you, or are you given a window into the narrator's thoughts?
As Stanzel mentions at the end of this passage, mediacy is made up of three elements: person, perspective, and mode. Person refers to who is narrating: is the narrator first or third person? Perspective is all about whether the narration comes from within or outside the world of the text. Finally, mode refers to the question of whether the narrative uses a narrator ("teller mode") or a reflector ("reflector mode").
Using these three elements, then, you can think about where the emphasis lies in whatever narrative you're analyzing. In other words, you can pinpoint the type and level of mediacy in a text and then figure out which of the narrative situations you've got on your hands.