Introduction

Rebecca Mackay is the author of The Great Believers, which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award in Fiction. She gave a talk called The Ear of the Story that focuses not on a story's point of view, but on something that is far less discussed: who is the story's implied listener? In poetry, you might talk about the speaker or the voice; we might also talk about the point of telling. We're going to leave this to the side for a while, but by the end of the talk, we're going to be getting into them.