A Survey on the Status of " Audience" in Narrative Literature

Telling or not telling story clearly distinguishes between narrative and non-narrative texts. As in narrative texts، there is a narrator، so there should be at least one audience. The most important factors، which determine the characteristics of the audience can be enumerated as: “level of narrative”، “level of narrator’s participation” and “level of his/her perception”. Here، in addition to explanation of two kinds of inter- and extra- text audience، we try to introduce direct and indirect signs of the presence of the audience. Thus the essential questions، which form the foundation of our study، are: “What is the difference between narrative and non-narrative texts?”، “How direct and indirect signs of the presence of the audience manifest in a story?” and the last question is: “What’s the meaning of inter- and extra- text audience in a text?”. This study through descriptive-analytic method and use of library resources represents direct and indirect signs of presence of the audience and it also explains differences between inside and outside the text audience in stories and narrative texts. The results of this study show that inside the text audience is identical with imagery addressee and outside the text audience is a real reader.