Are there any successful precedents of "gentle" fourth-wall-breaking?
The following is a paraphrased snippet of something I wrote, it is a conversation between the protagonist--a nihilist teenage boy--and an alien sociologist who communicates to him via telepathy, so the dialogue is private.
Alien: so, you don't want to go to the night club and get laid at all? The world is ending in three days or so, you know.
Boy: not really.
Alien: you don't want to die a virgin, do you? (reference here)
Boy: where did you get all these shoddy cultural references anyways?
Alien: well, I just had to say something that makes me sound like I know a thing or two about human society.
It may be too subtle or too obscure to be noticed, but the last sentence can be interpreted as me--the author--speaking to the reader and acknowledging my ignorance of popular culture.
My question is, is this kind of implicit/ambiguous fourth-wall breaking adding any value to my writing? I would also love to see some examples in existing literature that make use of this feature, if possible.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/27002. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
I don't know if I'd call that fourth-wall breaking as much as meta. Meta subtly acknowledges realities outside the text without explicitly addressing the reader.
Tolkien's unnamed narrator using I and you in The Hobbit is "breaking the fourth wall." The trope is that the story is being told to the reader by the narrator, although the narrator is not a character in the story.
Meta is more like on the BBC's Sherlock at the beginning of S03E01 "The Empty Hearse," where a group of fans meet to speculate about how Sherlock might have survived his plunge from the roof of St. Bart's hospital — including crashing through a plate-glass window to kiss Molly à la James Bond and throwing a dummy off the roof and kissing Moriarty. The Sherlock fandom spent two years volubly wondering and theorizing how he did it, and there are of course many different shipping communities, so the on-screen (textual) theories were a meta wink to the off-screen, real-life ones.
So you could, strictly speaking, have your line about "where did you get all these shoddy cultural references?" as an authorial nod to the reader: Yes, I understand that these are silly, and I did it on purpose. The only caveat is that your entire story has to be told that way, with multiple nods and winks and meta lines. You can certainly do it, but it will take some finesse to pull it off. Whether it adds value is up to the reader, and the kind of story you want to tell.
Crossovers can be meta too — Diane Duane's Young Wizards series has a cameo by Doctor Who in High Wizardry.
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