The best anecdote erases its narrator’s personality entirely.

Evidence

It not only provides a content in which all can participate alike; it also is a particular individual’s gift to the group but a gift behind which its giver becomes invisible: the subtlest and best-told stories are those from which the narrator’s personality has completely vanished. The perfect anecdote attains a happy equilibrium of sociable ethics, as it were, with its complete absorption of both subjective-individual and objective-contentual elements in the service of pure sociable form. — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 2287

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A narrator who vanishes behind the tale — ‘the personality has completely vanished’ — is a device directly usable for an unreliable or self-effacing storyteller frame.