The functions of the narrator of the novel ‘The Time of the Goats’ by Luan Starova

According to the renowned French researcher Gerard Genette, the narrator has five functions: the narrative function, the directing function, the communication function, the testimonial (emotional) function and the ideological function. The novel "The Time of Goats" will be initially, in the first and second part of the paper, analyzed for the type of narrator and the intervention of the implied author. In this novel we have an interesting combination of narrative levels: extradiegetic and intradiegetic levels which are translated in relation to the narrator of the story: he is involved in the story, (homodiegetic) but also, in large parts of the novel, we find him recounting things that he may not know, so he becomes a heterodiegetic narrator. The story starts in the first person plural, based on childhood memories, but quickly the narrator continues to narrate in the omniscient third person. I call such a narrator in this novel “the double narrator”. This kind of narrator uses childhood memories as the basis for the launch of the narrative, but it is the authorial narrator who takes charge. I will consider whether the author manages to justify this 'violation' of the narrative. In the third part of the paper, I will deal more extensively with the functions of “the double narrator”. For example, the child-narrator has a more testimonial and emotional function, whereas the authorial narrator has a communicative and ideological function. All these issues will be explained based on the theory of narratology and methods arising from this theory, accompanied by illustrations from the text of the novel.Keywords: Narrator, functions, time, goats, Starova