The Gospels unanimously present John the Baptist as the forerunner for Jesus the Messiah. Interpreters have affirmed that the Gospel writers recognized John as herald of the Messiah, appealing to John’s fulfillment of the language of Israel’s prophets. The significance of John’s role in Matthew’s Gospel in particular, however, has received insufficient recognition among interpreters of the Gospel. Studies on John and exegesis of the numerous passages regarding John in the Gospel of Matthew have typically focused on the historical person and comparative analysis of the Synoptic accounts involving John. Missing from these often atomized approaches to discerning John’s role in Matthew is the comprehensive approach of narrative criticism that traces John as a character in the story of the Gospel. A narrative-critical approach to the Gospel of Matthew offers a means to recognize that John’s role as the forerunner of Jesus in the narrative extended beyond John’s heralding the coming Messiah. This paper will argue that Matthew intentionally utilized John the Baptist in the narrative to prefigure and parallel Jesus as the story leads the intended reader from clarity to surprise and back to clarity. The introduction of John the Baptist in Matthew serves as a starting point to advance John as a central character in the unfolding narrative. John’s abrupt appearance into the narrative along with his subsequent description in Mt 3:1-6 clearly and explicitly identified him with the prophetic office in general and the prophet Elijah in particular. The intended Jewish audience would have recognized John’s role immediately based on his initial introduction. The subsequent unfolding of the narrative, however, would lead the reader in a surprising direction. Essentially, the reader of the Gospel of Matthew would have struggled to make sense of John as story advanced. The final scene involving John in the Gospel, however, made clear that John was to be accepted or rejected. In this way, John served as a forerunner for Jesus not just historically but narratively in Matthew’s Gospel.