ABSTRACT
The notion of 'narrative agency' is name for such a global frame of narration, and it involves the question of the source of narrative discourse, that is, the conception of some agency or agent that is responsible for the selection, arranging, and distribution of the story material. This chapter analyses a palette of available theoretical options to address the question of narrative agency in comics, and then elaborates the question in an extended close reading of a first-person graphic novel. The notion of the graphic narrator also begs the admittedly difficult question of how human-like or personal the graphic narrator may be conceived, in the sense of a human subject or intelligence communicating to his or her audience. The features of perspective-taking in Jiro Taniguchi's graphic novel point in the same direction: at the visual level of the story, the impersonal perspective is the predominant mode of showing and the subjective point of view remains a localised instance of intervention.
