The author implied author and the narrator is three of the six participants in the narrative communication situation. The author is a writer, a real person, who writes a novel or a story. For example, the woman who wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston is the novel’s author. A narrator is someone who conveys a story written by the author.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is built on the main character Janie’s memoirs, which she tells her friend Pheoby. The peculiarity of the novel is that Janie is not a narrator, and her words are presented only in dialogues. The book is written from the third person’s point of view – the narrator is detached from events but reports them to readers.
The implied author concept is more complex than the author and narrator. The writer is represented by a substitute agent in the text called the implied author. When writing a story, a writer embodies specific values, ideas, and beliefs in it. As a result, the implied author includes some norms and rules created by the author that govern the piece. These principles do not necessarily correspond to the ideas and emotions that guide the writer in real life and may even be the opposite.
Implied authors can also be seen as the impression readers create about a person who wrote a story. The implied author is an interpretive construct and is produced by the reader. Since the implied author is a manifestation of the writer’s intentions and ideas, it dramatically affects the perception of the piece.
Hurston’s novel combines various concepts and issues related to love, race, social class, hopes, and other themes. The reader can create a construct of an implied author as an African-American woman concerned about a person’s place in the world. She also explores the ideas of completeness of experience and satisfaction with life and the extent to which life events depend on a person’s will and destiny.