heterodiegetic

9.9

A person who tells the story but is not a character in it

adjective
/ˌhɛtəroʊˈdaɪəˌdʒɛtɪk/

Literature

: heterodiegético

The heterodiegetic narrator never saw the events because he/she/it never occupied the story world.
heterodiegetic narrator
heterodiegetic narration
heterodiegetic narrative

Examples

The second-person narration occupies a middle position, oscillating between but never reducible to either the homodiegetic or the heterodiegetic.

Academic text (1994)
For the most part, narrative theory generally proceeds as if all novels were written entirely in the first person or third person, heterodiegetic or homodiegetic.

Academic text (1994)
Still, they all get their chance to focalize the story that the extra- and heterodiegetic narrator is telling.

Academic text (2009)
The narrator in such fiction is therefore heterodiegetic in Genette's terminology.

Academic text (1994)
But is this normalizing drive also inherent in a particular novel's heterodiegetic regime?

Academic text (2009)
The narrator of The Echo Maker is extradiegetic, heterodiegetic, and almost completely invisible.

Academic text (2009)
The heterodiegetic narrator offers no display of superior narrative authority (Structures 71).

Academic text (2009)
Historically, the overt, heterodiegetic narrators of the nineteenth-century novel were traditionally invested with a high degree of credibility.

Academic text (2001)
We cannot determine whether Askar is telling his story using three different pronouns or whether an extra- and heterodiegetic narrator is employing all three forms or whether two or three distinct narrators are at work.

Academic text (1994)
In some novels, the heterodiegetic narrator provides insights without being an active character in the story.

Synonyms

extradiegetic

vsheterodiegetic

Jargon

9.9

Something outside the story that characters cannot see or hear

applies specifically to a narrator rather than to other outside elements

Surface Forms

heterodiegetic positive

Morphology

heterodiegetic = diegetic (opaque) = hetero + diegesis + ic

Both the prefix 'hetero-' and the base 'diegetic' are specialist combining forms from narratology, so the compound is unlikely to be derivable by an average B1 learner.

Etymology

The word heterodiegetic comes from the parts hetero- meaning 'other' and diegetic meaning 'telling' or 'story'. So a heterodiegetic narrator is an 'other' narrator who is outside the story, not one of the characters, and tells what happens.