DEIXIS

"DEIXIS IS WHAT SPEAKERS DO to locate themselves in space and time, with respect to things, events, and each other. When speaking, it is impossible not to be deictic, not to "be in" the context of one's discourse. Not being deictic is not communicating, not being in a situation, not being. This is what happens in some narratives, whose narrator disappears behind the events of the story and which seem to be deploying themselves without the intervention of any speaker. Such narrative, however, is strictly a written achievement, made possible by the fictional space that writing creates. In oral narrative, it is just as impossible for a narrator to disappear as it is for any speaker, and to discover the signs of that presence is, I believe, an important aspect of the study of oral traditions that have come down tous in the form of text."

Egbert J. Bakker
Homeric Oytos and the Poetics of Deixis
Classical Philology, Vol. 94, No. 1. (Jan., 1999), p. 1.