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When I read a short story and my professor asks me to write about the general character and values of the speaker, is the character the one that...

First, you must differentiate between narrator and speaker. If "speaker" simply means a character who says something in the story, then that character "wrote" the story (in a sense) only if he/she is also the first person narrator. This is usually the case. Think of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. 


This depends on the point of view. If the story is written in the third person, the narrator uses "he, she, they, etc." In other words, the narrator never uses "I" because he/she is not in the story. If this is the case, the third person narrator is not really a character in the story. You might be able to describe the values and characteristics of the narrator, as one removed from the world of the story. There is a sense that a third person narrator tells the reader the story and in that sense seems to have written it. But the third person narrator is not a character in the story. 


If the story is written in the first person ("I"), it is more clear. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway is the narrator and a character in the novel. He is the narrative speaker and he actually speaks to other characters in the novel. To be clear, Nick is not F. Scott Fitzgerald, but since Nick is the character telling us (narrating) the story, we can say that Nick is the one who wrote the story (within the context of the story itself). So, in a case like this, the speaker/narrator (Nick) is a character who "wrote" the story because it is he who relates it to us (readers). 

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