The fourth wall is an invisible, imaginary wall separating actors/characters from the audience. The audience can see through this wall, but it is assumed the actors/characters cannot. In film, "breaking the fourth wall" happens whenever the actors look directly into the camera and address the audience. Examples include Oliver Hardy looking into the camera to get sympathy from his audience, or Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor, or Ferris Bueller. In literature, breaking the fourth wall is a technique often used in metafiction. The metafiction genre occurs when a character within a literary work acknowledges the reality that they are in fact a fictitious being. Have you ever broken the fourth wall in your writing? What do you think of this as a technique?
I don’t think the character need to acknowledge they are fictitious, but they obviously need to address the audience. I think most commonly the character believes they are real and the story is real, and they are relaying the story to an audience. Too Like the Lightning and Book of the New Sun are two books that do this well I think, and not coincidentally both are told in first person. I did it once and my beta readers hated it.
Can't say I've ever read anything like that. Vonnegut did authorial insertion in Breakfast of Champions (I think), which isn't the same but has a similar effect. It works for him with his sardonic tones. Overall, though, the idea has a high probability of gimmicky lameness to it. There would have to be a good reason to break the inner logic of the story... to somehow elevate the story by breaking it. I can't imagine why, though.
I haven't used this in my own writing, nor do I plan to. It can be fun sometimes, when used with skill - thinking the first Deadpool movie. But I think the "meta" stuff has been done to death in TV shows and movies over the past several years. I say that breaking the fourth wall can take a hike! (or at least give it a rest for a little bit)
Movies are different. The Fourth Wall thing harkens to the theater, where actors would mug for the audience or occasionally interact with them directly. It doesn't really violate the integrity of the medium because the audience is already there and not always treated as if they don't exist. We probably shouldn't call it the Fourth Wall in literature, because the written word has a million walls. Or maybe zero walls, depending on how you look at it. It is literally a stimuli-less (stimulus-less?) medium that engages none of the senses, unless you consider the black text on white paper a visual medium, which I don't. Literature instead taps directly into the imagination by providing symbols that trigger sights, sounds, and emotions. So I'm not sure there's really a wall to break there. It's probably more of a self-referential, postmodern engagement, would we would consider a Fourth Wall. But like I said, I've never read it before in the way we're referencing it. There's plenty of first person stories that make it clear that the narrator is telling a story to an audience, directly referring to the events as if they've happened long ago, so there's not wall to break because it's been established that the wall doesn't exist in the first place, but that's not really the same thing either.
I guess the closest I've come is in a postmodern comedy I had characters say things like "I haven't felt so good since chapter five, when you rescued me from the evil witch!" Reminds me of Monty Python: "It's the old man from Scene 37." (or whatever number).
I'm a sucker for lines that skate close, like "That's the sort of thing that happens in stories, not real life." That's probably as far as I'd go in my own work. Humorous soliloquies (or asides, whatever), especially coy ones, really burn my toast. The Big Short (2015) comes to mind as a movie that did that, and I wasn't amused to say the least. I would have a higher tolerance for a serious-toned fourth wall break. Can't think of any examples that don't involve live theater, but I suspect that would less so deflate tension.
Very interesting idea. One I've never thought about. But it's true—there are people, just like the people in the audience, standing on a stage, pretending to be in a room with four walls, and deliberately ignoring the audience. Except I suppose for pausing to accomodate lengthy applause or laughter before delivering the next line and such. That artifice is part of the very nature of theater, but in reading it doesn't exist. The characters, the rooms, and everything else are strictly imaginary, called into existence in the reader's mind by the words on the page. Another of the big differences between written stories and movies or plays.
I thought you were talking about this (which turns out to actually be The Big Story): Very um—self-referential, but not exactly breaking the fourth wall.
I've not ever read any metafiction myself, but it sounds intriguing. It seems metafiction experiments with format and structure in order to "blow your mind." I just downloaded If On A Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino, a work of metafiction that I am going to start reading today! The description below of it is from the article 10 Meta Novels That Will Blow Your Mind If on a winter's night a traveler tells the story of a protagonist named the Reader and how he falls in love with the Other Reader (and the other protagonist) while they are both reading the Italo Cavino novel If on a winter's night a traveler. Fun fact: you are the Reader, and you end up marrying the Other Reader. Congrats! However, will you ever finish If on a winters night a traveler? Read on to find out.
From the description you included, it sounds like it's both self-referential (refers to itself as a story in some way), and recursive. Meaning there are iterations of the same thing, like endless reflections between two mirrors. Or am I using two different terms for the same thing? It gets crazy and hard to think about when you start doing this. You get lost in it. But that said, it doesn't seem such a story really breaks the fourth wall, except in a metaphorical way, by admitting to readers that it is indeed a story, rather than presenting it straightforwardly. Like in the Scream movies, horror movies where the characters talk about being characters in a horror movie... I mean, in a way it's the same thing, but characters in a story can't literally look through an imaginary wall at an audience. The written equivalent is for narrator or characters to make clever asides or relate directly to the reader as if they understand they're characters in a story you're reading. Lol yeah, it's always a little bit mind-blowing to even write about it. It's the kind of thing that, when you write about it, the writing becomes what you're writing about... Ok, gotta stop now.
In a sense there is a wall—between the real world of the reader and the imaginary world of the story. And that wall can be broken when characters or narrator refer directly to the reader and break that pretense that the two worlds are separate. It's just that it's more metaphorical rather than literal as it is in theater. It's the same thing that happened in modern art as opposed to classical art. In classical the frame of a painting was thought of as a window through which the viewer should feel like they're looking into a three-dimensional reality that's as perfectly depicted as possible. But in modern art, starting with Impressionism, technique started to become important in such a way as to draw attention to the surface of the painting itself, to brush strokes and dabs of paint, rather than making them invisible to contribute to the illusion of reality in the image. In other words, as I've heard it put, the subject switched from being the people and objects presented in the painting to the surface of the canvas itself. Now viewers are meant to see it as a canvas hanging on a wall, rather than imagine it as a window they're looking through. It's about meta-thinking, our ability to think about the way we think, and to talk about the way we talk. Which is another way to say something is self-referential. Man, it's hard to talk about this stuff, or rather it's distracting, because you notice that you're doing the very thing you're talking about doing, and you find yourself looking into that endless set of reflections, and now realize you're in the picture, being endlessly reflected. It becomes tiresome after a while, once the novelty wears off, doesn't it? My mind is getting tired from having to stretch itself so far again and again to do this.
I will! Here's how it starts: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade...
Sorry to keep doing this, but another small epiphany— Now I can see that the page of a classical story is like the canvas was in classical painting—treated as a clear window through which you peer into another world, and writers would use every trick to make that world feel real (even if it's highly imaginative or unrealistic). The trick was to maintain the illusion of it being a real place and the characters real people. But in a postmodern story the page is no longer a transparent window kept squeaky clean, instead it's now the subject. Not the actual page itself, but the writing I suppose. Now you're supposed to see characters as characters, the illusion is no longer supreme. Oh, writers still work hard on the illusion, but now they add another layer to it, the layer of self-reference and meta-ness. So strange to think about. I feel like I'm twisting my brain into a pretzel! Or more of a moebius strip.
Well, I've read the prologue and chapter one. Unlike anything I have ever read before. Feel like I am writing the story with the author. Extremely engrossing!! Very, very much want to read on.
What is If on a winter's night a traveler about? It's about me (the reader) and a mysterious man in a smoky train station. The connection between us is the writer, and the writing, but it is a one-way connection. I know about the man and what's happening to him and he seems quite real to me, but he knows nothing about me. The writer, however, seems to have a very good understanding of me (the reader) and includes me every step of the way. I wish I had more time to read today. I took myself to Costco this afternoon. Crazy busy. There I was, in the midst of all these people and all this activity that I was not connected to, that I was separate from, a sort of isolation, the opposite of the feeling I get when reading this book. Feeling very connected. I imagine metafiction wouldn't be for everyone, but so far I'm thinking Calvino is a genius. And now I have to go to my brother's! Happy New Year everyone!
I see it sometimes where a writer will switch to 'second person' in the narrative explaining 'you'd think they would have known better. The writer responded there was nothing wrong with using 'you' even though he was in third close POV. I didn't argue the point, but I thought it might work better with inner thought or lay it off on an ambiguous person like 'one should have known' better.
I’ve used this kind of thing for writing humor. I wrote a science fiction story where a starship captain discovers an old science-fiction story that is the story he’s in. He frames it as the author predicting his actions with perfect accuracy, and reads ahead to find a solution to his problem.
Kevin Spacey did this early in House of Cards. It was the main negative of comments on the show early on.
