I have been arguing that our basic interpretive strategy, for film as for literature, is to look for an intentional explanation of what is put before us – image or text. I have said nothing yet about the role of a narrator in all this. Here we shall find some important differences between the roles of narrators in literature and in film; film offers much less scope for the narrator than does literature. Also, film requires us to acknowledge that there can be unreliable narration without there being any narrator to whom we can ascribe the unreliability. This will require a substantial revision of accepted theory. This chapter will also lend weight to the claims of Chapter 8 concerning the implied author; it will specify in some detail how appeal to the implied author helps us make sense of the text or image. It will also show how the concept of the implied author is more significant for understanding narrative than is that of the narrator.

There is one other issue of general significance on which this chapter will bear. Recent writing on the theory of literature and film has tended to focus on ways in which the act of interpretation resembles or exemplifies pathological behaviour.