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and let a younger person re-tell the story. At that point, the author became an unobtrusive author.

Likewise, since the caveman narrated the story himself at fireside, he was an obtrusive narrator. He was also a self-narrator, not pretending to be anyone but himself. Eventually, he also may have taken on the role of an actor, pretending to be someone else as he told a story, a fictitious narrator. For other stories, the narrator might have attempted to downplay his role as narrator by telling the story through the consciousness of one or more of the characters, thus becoming an unobtrusive narrator.

Initially, the storyteller may have used the first-person point of view to tell stories, either about himself or about others. Over the ages as his language allowed for it, he may have used either past tense or present tense. He could also tell stories about others, using them as characters, maybe even viewpoint characters, using third-person point of view, with either a distant perspective or up close and personal.

Eventually, the caveman grew tired of telling the same old hunting and survival tales, so he began to make up stories, maybe to explain the wonders around him. Why the sun rose and set daily. The origin and functions of the moon and the stars. Explanations for the weather and the seasons. He may very well have used third-person omniscient to tell those tales: "A long time ago, before the earth existed . . ."

No doubt, some storytellers worked audience participation into the stories. They may have learned that the audience could be counted on to fill in some of the blanks in the story with certain assumptions and cues. Who knows, maybe cavemen were the first to say: "Resist the urge to explain," "Show, don't tell," "Avoid repetition," and "Leave out the boring stuff."

Even with the invention of writing, the printing press, and the novel, the basic relationship between author, narrator, character, and reader has remained largely as it did around the caveman's campfire. The addition of new media with which to tell stories, however, has endowed the author with a greater range of choices, pushing author schizophrenia to new levels. For example, the author may choose to:

* Be an obtrusive author, an unobtrusive author, or anywhere in between;

* Be an obtrusive narrator, an unobtrusive narrator, or anywhere in between;

* Be a self-narrator, or to create a fictitious narrator;

* Have the narrator utilize first-person point of view, to tell his own story or someone else's,

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