Adaptation presents the main character Susan's writing process concurrently with Charlie's and their voice-overs are heard from the very start of the film. But neither Charlie's voice nor Susan's voice is the overarching narrative voice of the film.
Kaufman's authorial presence is less explicit and more covert. Kaufman intentionally credits the screenplay to Charlie Kaufman himself and the fictional character, Charlie's alter-ego, Donald Kaufman to play on the reliability of his narration. Kaufman's authorial presence appears in disguise as we see snippets of his self-expression through the voices of the main characters in his film.
The purpose - to destroy viewer's obsession with narrative. According to Joshua Landy, after testing out and denying 6 different approaches of adapting The Orchid Thief including posing the questions of how to adapt flowers to a narrative through Charlie's mouth; the impossibility of making a movie about a flower with a flower's arc; not enough narrative to unite to tell a story involving flowers; inventing a story around flowers driven by drugs, sex, guns and car crashes but ended up being what Charlie originally hated; turning flowers into an analogy to human life to show us how to live; turning the story of the impossibility of making a film about flowers into a narrative, the movie finally reaches the scene that reveals an overarching strategy Kaufman inserted.
The ending scene brings viewers back to the original promise of making a film about something static and cyclical that embodies no narratives but is only achieved through the “detour” of excessively satisfying viewers with the possibilities of narratives (Landy 510).
Kaufman's voice and stance is constantly over shadowed by the point of views of his character but it's the underlying driving momentum of the film which is to cure us of our “insatiable appetite for narrative” (Landy 513).
In addition, Kaufman asserts several other traces that proves the identification between himself and the overarching narrative voice. Following the opening scene with the black screen, the scene cut to a video clip “Being John Malkovich” where Charlie is found lurking behind the film set looking neurotic just as what he said at the opening scene about his disorder of “brain chemistry” (Kaufman). This video clip, shot differently from the rest of the movie, indicates a different kind of “seeing” in Chatman's words. He writes , "There is necessarily presupposed another act of seeing with an independent point of view, namely that of the narrator, who has peered into the character's mind (metaphors are inevitable) and reports its contents from his own point of view" (Chatman 155) .This indicates the voices of the fictional Charlie or the fictional Susan are nested within another narrator who oversees everything in the film.
The first distinction that is made, following Genette (1980), is between a narrator who is also a character in the story – a homodiegetic narrator, and a narrator who is NOT a character in the story but in a way hovers above it and knows everything about it – a heterodiegetic narrator. If the homodiegetic narrator is also the protagonist of the narrative, it is an autodiegetic narrator.
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