Thus, we can have the experience of "losing ourselves" in a book, a play, a movie or even a painting and still be aware that, for all the affective force of that experience, we are not hallucinating some alternative form of reality but that we are engaged with a product of human mind, of human craft, and of the culture in which that product was created. We may suspend disbelief when at a play but still know that we are in a theater; we may be blind and deaf to the world around us when caught up in a novel but still know that we are reading printed words; we may cringe, weep, laugh, or yell at the movie screen in alarm but still know that we are watching moving images enclosed within a frame.

Our dual awareness of art is complicated further when the artistic medium presents a fictional narrative, since we must engage with narrative on additional levels. A narrative is a construction or representation of characters and events within a diegesis, a fictional world that by necessity is presented only in part, but which by implication exists as a larger or smaller fragment of a much greater whole, whether that whole be a specific historical time and place, an alternative reality, a present-day city or town, or a galaxy far, far away in a time long ago. Our engagement with these diegetic elements, leading to our awareness of narrative details and the construction of inferred diegetic universes, is prompted by the material means available through specific media: written language, enactment by performers, graphic or photographic representation, auditory cues, and so on. That engagement also means that any narrative representation, however convincing and enthralling it may be at the time of perception, always evokes, to one degree or another, not only a double, but a triple awareness. First, there is that contextual awareness, including our awareness of the physical medium—the material elements of word, sight and/or sound that convey the narrative and our own physical context as perceivers (reading, watching, listening, etc.). Then, there is our awareness of the narrative itself--the diegetic events, characters, time and space presented by the text. Finally, there is an intermediate form of awareness: our awareness of the textual means by which that diegesis has been created or at least implied—in other words, our awareness of narration.

Following the "cognitivist" approach to understanding narrative developed by David Bordwell and others, we can describe narration as the means by which we are prompted to reconstruct an implied narrative whole—the "story" (or "histoire" or "fabula"). That act of reconstruction is prompted by those parts of the narrative that are presented to us—the "plot" (or "discourse" or "syuzhet" [2])—through the linguistic and/or audio-visual means employed by (if not unique to) each specific medium. In film, those means—the cinematic elements of style—that interact with the plot include such things as camera movement and placement, editing, lighting and arrangement of the mise-en-scene, and the uses of sound. The interaction of "plot" and "style" thus forms the core of "narration" in film, as Bordwell defines it: "a process, the activity of selecting, arranging, and rendering story material in order to achieve specific time-bound effects on a perceiver" (Narration in the Fiction Film xi) or "the process whereby the film’s syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula" (NITFF 53, Bordwell’s emphasis).

To engage fully with narration, then, we must in some way be ready to catch the cues and processes that prompt our reconstruction of that hypothetical text. In film, those cues are provided (mainly) by sounds and images; in literature, they are provided (mainly) by words. However, our engagement with the narrative is always to some degree provisional, dependent on how we bring to bear our awareness of the text as artifact, as something constructed by someone (or another something), as sounds and images or as words, selected and arranged in particular ways. Thus, the process of narration itself interacts with our own expectations concerning three different kinds of agency, the means by which something is created or enacted. As we shall see, the notion of agency in fictional texts usually involves such familiar, if misunderstood, concepts as the "narrator" and the "author." These two terms name agents of presentation and creation, respectively, but an understanding of agency and narration in film (or other media) also involves reception and perception. Rather than ask "Who acts?" or "Who speaks?" or "Who creates?," it may be more fruitful to ask what awareness of "acting," "speaking," and "creation" we bring to fictional texts as perceivers. And we may further ask how those texts encourage, evade, suppress, or direct that awareness.