Expanding Gerald Prince’s Theory about Audience’s Narrative Understanding of Narratives

The level of understanding of the internal audience (internal listeners) and external (external readers) of the narrative is always a complex and relative issue, and it is absolutely impossible to make a judgment about the level of understanding of the two categories of the audience of the narrative. This case is one of the oldest issues of human narration; thus, the narrator’s sensitivities to the subtleties of the narration, regardless of expressing some content and not finding a pleasant audience, indicate the classification of the audience base and the relative nature of their relationship with the narration. Also, such topics as the insignificance of “structure” compared to “expectation” and the answer to the question “what will happen next?” that Edward Morgan Forster proposed are indicative of different classes of audiences and their relative understanding of the narrative. This issue was first raised by Gerald Prince concerning the position of narratees. Given that the textual examples of the theory were chosen from Western texts, it is almost difficult for the Persian audience to understand them. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to examine and expand this theory using perfect examples from Persian fictional texts.