There is no narrator, no narrator at all. Although he may from time to time think he exists, he will be mistaken. Every story arises from fertile emptiness, dwells for a moment or two, and disappears into thin air. A breath.
It is patently ridiculous for me, the writer, to try to convince you, the reader, to pretend the story is actually happening, now, in some world concocted of a “willing suspension of disbelief.” This is fine for children, but are you so easily tricked, so willingly made a fool? What then of ‘story’? you may ask. What, precisely, is the point? Not escape, I would answer, not fantasy. How could I pretend that you don’t have Hiroshima, Bergen-Belsen and other codes of our time permanently fixed at the back of your mind, how pretend that you are not, this moment, hearing the throb of traffic, the seductive whisper of the television commercial from the other room. I’m surprised you have space in your mind for these words at all. No, ‘story’ has nothing to do with a “willing suspension of disbelief.”
Stories that counted, from the very beginning, were always about ritual. In escape or fantasy, repetition of the same story is ruinous, deadening. In ritual, repetition is the point, the words welling up as a form of magical incantation, gaining depth with each reading. The importance of ritual and repetition is found in the fact that it is the reader who changes, not the story, the reader who, like the narrator, does not exist at all.