Tuesday, April 19, 2016

fiction - Can a writer joke with the reader without breaking the fourth wall?


Can I, for example, write a whole new storyline inside my novel, and then say something, for example such as: "just kidding"? Or is that breaking the fourth wall?



Answer



You can do it, if you have a narrator who is explicitly speaking to someone. For example, if you have a framing narrative where the protagonist tells the story of his life to another person, or if you have a framing narrative where the protagonist writes down the story of his life (he would then be joking to himself).


If your protagonist directly experiences the story, then the narration is a sort of self-reflection and you can have the "thinker" sugarcoating something to himself and then think to himself: "But who am I kidding?"


Otherwise any address to the reader in a narrative that doesn't address the reader is breaking the fourth wall.


No comments:

Post a Comment

technique - How credible is wikipedia?

I understand that this question relates more to wikipedia than it does writing but... If I was going to use wikipedia for a source for a res...