A narrator is a person who tells a story to an audience. Narrators occur in face-to-face story-telling, and in literary works, movies, and plays. They can be fictional, or they can be real people. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three parts in any story-telling. The others are the author and the audience; in literature, the latter is the reader.