a presumed detachment from the story of both the speaker and the audience.

Diegesis is multi-levelled in narrative fiction. Gérard Genette distinguishes between three "diegetic levels":
* The extradiegetic level (the level of the narrative's telling) is, according to Prince, "external to (not part of) any diegesis". One might think of this as what we commonly understand to be the narrator's level, the level at which exists a narrator who is not part of the story being told. (Contrast