Narrators are, in more than one sense, formed by their own narrations. Their reputations, and thus their self-identities, can be made by the skill of their performances. If they describe themselves, that description is part of the narration, and so, as we have seen, may be their claims to authority, their topic orientation and the stance they take to listeners. They may also be performing in a mode which encourages – or denies – certain presentations of self; again, that became clear when scrutinising different Jlao performances. It is possible to argue that it is the rules of that mode or genre which shape the self-presentation. There are also members of oral societies who would agree with certain literary critics that the teller is irrelevant to the tale.

Questions of subjective determination and levels of agency are difficult to resolve and I shall come back to them. In written literatures, such arguments assume or turn on the predefined structures with which artists work as novelists or essayists, poets or playwrights. The rules of form in these genres may themselves construct the presence of narrators, or require that they are absented, though it is acknowledged that creative authors play with the rules, and also extend boundaries of possibility for successors.