In narrative texts, a story is never told directly; rather, a narrative authority or narrative voice (primary narrator) mediates the event (Schmid 2010, 6). We find such authorial narrative voices, for example, in ancient epic poetry. Virgil's Aeneid begins with arma virumque cano. In the first person of the verb cano, a narrative voice articulates itself that narrates what now follows, without this 'I' having to be identical with the historical author Vergil. Within the work, one or more subordinate narrative voices (secondary narrator, tertiary narrator, etc.) may be embedded (de Jong 2014, 34–36). In Virgil's Aeneid, for instance, this applies to books 2 and 3: for here the character Aeneas narrates the events that precede the initial situation of book 1 (the fall of Troy and the travels to Carthage).

The narrative voice (narrator) is opposed by a receiving entity (narratee); since this modeling has references to communication theory, one sometimes also speaks of transmitters and receivers of a (textual) message. Just as there are different levels of narrators on the sender side, there can be multiple levels of narratees on the receiver side. In books 2 and 3 of the Aeneid, Dido (and the Carthaginians) are primary narrators, while readers of the work are secondary narrators. Depending on whether a narrative voice narrates an event in which it is itself involved as a character (observing or acting) or not, a distinction is made between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic voice. In the Aeneid, the auctorial narrative voice is heterodiegetic, whereas Aeneas' account in Books 2 and 3 is homodiegetic.

Literary communication differs from a communicative 'standard case' especially in 2 dimensions. First, sender, text, and receiver are in an 'asymmetrical' relationship (Iser 1994, 262–264). This means that both narrative instances do not face each other in a face-to-face situation. Therefore, a special effort has to be spent to elicit the specific contextual frame of understanding in order to understand the contents of the literary message. Second, communication in literary texts follows different interactional frameworks. With Knape, one can speak in this case of specialized or art-communication, in which the rules of 'securing understanding', which are presupposed as a cooperative principle of successful standard communication (Grice 1975), are "suspended or significantly modified in a specific way" (Knape 2008, 895–906, citation 899; trsl. is our own). It is precisely against this background that it is helpful to speak, in the case of literature, not of an author's intention but of a 'narrative strategy' (Tjupa 2014) of an abstract authorial instance reconstructed on the basis of the text (Schmid 2010, 36–51) that controls the narrator's speech act.

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