A label used on this site
The Narrator's Pocket
Last revised
The narrator's pocket is this site's name for whatever a narrative has not yet handed to the reader at a given point. A story can hold something back for pages. The question this label asks is why it is held back, and this site sorts the answer into one of three kinds.
The three kinds
not-yet-known: at that point in the story, the narrator does not know it either. The reader and the narrator learn it together.delayed: the narrator tells the story afterwards and already knows the answer, but lets the facts arrive in the order they were met.concealed: the narrator knows it and should have said it at that point, but keeps it back on purpose.
Each item in a pocket is given exactly one of these kinds, and the three are never mixed in a single label.
Why the kind matters
For detective fiction, the pocket is where questions of fairness are settled. A clue the narrator could not have known is a different matter from one the narrator chose to hide, and a clue held back only because the story is told in order is different again. Whether a detective story plays fair with its reader depends on which kind of pocket holds the clue and when it is emptied.
An example
The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” first printed in Graham's Magazine in April 1841, is never named. He and his friend C. Auguste Dupin first learn of the crime from an evening paper, and they read the witnesses' statements in “The next day's paper.” Only after that do they go to the house.
The narrator tells all this after the case is over, so he already knows the solution. Even so, he lets the evidence reach the reader in the order he met it, and the explanation is left to Dupin. On this site that is classed as delayed. It is not a case of the narrator hearing the witnesses himself, and not a case of deliberate concealment: what he holds back is what the retelling saves until the detective speaks.