The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Intrusive narrator

Intrusive narrator: An omniscient, third-person narrator who provides personal commentary or observation in addition to relating a story. The intrusive narrator is opinionated, not detached and impersonal, and makes valuative judgments on the action and characters in a work. By convention, an intrusive narrator’s assertions are intended to be authoritative. The term intrusive is sometimes also applied to first-person narrators, particularly when they interrupt the narrative with a personal digression or directly address the reader.

EXAMPLES: Works featuring intrusive third-person narrators include Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), whose narrator declares that he “intend[s] to digress, through this whole history, as often as I see occasion, of which I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic whatever”; Leo Tolstoi’s War and Peace (1864—66); Halldór Laxness’s Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960); Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984); and Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband (2004), which begins: “When María de las Nieves Moran crossed from convent school to cloister to become a novice nun, it was to prevent Paquita Aparicio, her beloved childhood companion, from marrying the man both girls called ’El Anticristo.’ Of course that is not the version known to history.”

An example of intrusive first-person narration is Jane’s announcement in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847): “Reader, I married him.”