Blasphemy!

I don't think that Sam Elliott's totally awesome character/mustache in The Big Lebowski could really be considered a narrator; if the film had one, it would have to be The Dude.

Probably the main issue with this interpretation is the initial voice over in the opening scene of the movie, and his aside when he is sitting at the bar. But I think this would almost be analogous to the prologue of a book; like, if some minor character in Great Expectations had written a brief introduction to the novel, Pip is still the narrator. The Big Lebowski isn't explicitly told in the first person like Great Expectations, but it's almost entirely from The Dude's perspective. So I guess this brings me to the question of what exactly constitutes a narrator and why it's the Dude and not Sam Elliott.

I have to admit I have a really hard time thinking past the freshman-year Honors English vocab words we all had to memorize: omniscient, first person limited, third person limited, unreliable, blah blah blah. And I guess those are useful diagnostic tools in some sense after the narrator has been identified but really what is it that makes a narrator? I have to say that the narrator is the character through whom we understand the events of the film. And that's exactly what The Dude is in The Big Lebowski. We see two guys breaking into his house to pee on his rug; we don't see this from the perspective of the thieves, but from The Dude's. Sam Elliott may put some kind of context or message into the story, but we understand it as The Dude's story, and not Sam Elliott's story about The Dude. The only time we really and truly leave his perspective is the voice-over at the beginning and end, and again these seem like merely footnotes or sort of bookends to this story that someone else told.

In this vein, I think that all films in some way or another have a narrator, or possibly multiple narrators, because there is always some conduit to convey the action and events of the film, even in movies that are a sort of series of vignettes. Coffee and Cigarettes may have had multiple narrators, but they were there in every scene.