The Extradiegetic Narrative Level
An extradiegetic narrator is one who narrates a story from outside the fictional universe of a particular text. This narrator communicates the primary narrative to an audience equally removed from the storyworld; this audience, then, is the extradiegetic narratee. Extradiegetic narrators may be characters in their narratives, but at the moment of narration they are operating from without its storyworld.
In Eliza Haywood's Anti-Shamela, for instance, it is at the novel's extradiegetic level that the narrator interrupts the sequence of narrative events to share directly with her audience some reflections on her heroine's unfortunate circumstances: "Here one cannot forbear reflecting, how shocking it is, when those who should point out the Paths of Virtue, give a wrong Bent to the young and unform'd Mind . . . But as this is an Observation, that must occur to every thinking Person, I ought to beg my Reader's Pardon for the Digression, and return" (57). Here, then, the communication between the narrator and narratee occurs outside the primary narrative and, hence, at the extradiegetic level. |