The Role of Narrator in Serial Radio Fiction: The Case of ‘Taxi Key’

Abstract

In spite of the prominence acquired by dialogues among characters in creating a series, we cannot ignore that radio speech can be represented in turn by the narrators's presence. For this reason, in the present article the emblematic Taxi Key detective series has been selected as an object of study, in order to determine the narrators's appearance percentage in the series episodes, the narrator's typology that prevails and the main functions that plays in this fictional product. It is an exploratory study in which descriptive and inferential analyzes have been made from Taxi Key original radio scripts. The results of the study reveal that narrator's presence reaches the most significant prevalence in the episodes of the sample, being the autodiegetic narrator who stands as the most frequent type of narrator. Providing contextual information, acting as a nexus and transition device between scenes and assessing the characters or incorporating them on stage are the narrator's functions that prevail in this series that remained almost twenty years on Radio Barcelona network.

Keywords

• series
• Taxi Key
• guion radiofónico
• policiaco
• narrador
• autodiegético