It’s a bit of a toss-up between readers thus far on whether our hero is actually arguing with an omniscient narrator or perhaps he is arguing with himself as he may in fact be his own narrator.

Which is it?

I’ll let you decided for yourself.

NARRATOR

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A narrator is, within any story (literary work, movie, play, verbal account, etc.), the person who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also acharacter within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator (or the female equivalent, narratress)^[1] is one of three entities responsible for story-telling of any kind. The others are the author and the audience; the latter called the "reader" when referring specifically to literature.

The author and the audience both inhabit the real world. It is the author's function to create the universe, people, and events within the story. It is the audience's function to understand and interpret the story. The narrator exists within the world of the story (and only there—although in non-fiction the narrator and the author can share the same persona, since the real world and the world of the story may be the same) and present it in a way the audience can comprehend.

A narrator may tell the story from his own point of view (as a fictive entity) or from the point of view of one of the characters in the story. The act or process of telling the particulars of a story is referred to as narration. Along with exposition, argumentation, and description, narration (broadly defined) is one of four rhetorical modesof discourse. More narrowly defined, narration is the fiction-writing mode whereby the narrator communicates directly to the reader.

The concept of the unreliable narrator (as opposed to "author") became more prominent with the rise of the novel in the 18th century. Until the late 19th century,literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry (including epic poems like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, and poetic drama like Shakespeare). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author. But novels, with their immersive^{[peacock term]} fictional worlds, created a problem, especially when the narrator's views differed significantly^{[clarification needed]} from that of the author.