Narratology

The entry most likely to mislead an English reader is personal. It looks like « personal », and the two do share a Latin ancestor, but in German narrative theory it names almost the opposite of a confiding voice. The Austrian theorist Franz K. Stanzel called a narrative situation personal when no narrator steps forward at all: the story is told in the third person and filtered through one character, die Reflektorfigur, so that we see only what she sees. The English term is « figural ». Everyday German says persönlich for the English sense, and a novel told by an intimate I is eine Ich-Erzählung, whose two halves are in this list as das erzählende Ich and das erlebende Ich. So personal answers the question of who perceives, never the question of whose private feelings are on show.