The Homeric narrator as an intermediate between the world of the heroes and the world of the audience

Abstract

The primary narrator of the Iliad, that is, the one who controls the progress of the main narrative, has the global knowledge typical in epic narrators. He is omniscient, knows past, present and future, narrates in third person, and because of his universal knowledge, his voice has authority and his speech does not allow questioning. By means of narratology applied to Greek hexameter poetry, an intratextual reading of the poem and the notion of traditional referentiality, we intend to study moments in the narrative in which the narrator highlights his role as intermediate between the world of heroes and the world of "men such as they are now", that is, when he narrates in a non-distanced way, referring explicitly or implicitly to his narratee or his audience. Our main object of analysis on this issue will be the expressions "men such as they are now" and "men of a former time", and the similes. The latter have commonly been understood as a way of communicating to the audience certain actions of the main narrative through the narrator's comparison between a heroic deed and, in most instances, an action from the everyday life of the common man, that is, of the poems' audience. Finally, to extend the analysis of the audience as an intrinsic element in the production and reception of the poem at the time of enunciation, we will discuss an internal perspective to the poems, the one of the gods as an audience of the narrated events, since they can also be represented by Homer as composing an audience of the events of the heroic world. (AU)