When can You Pause the Story and Speak Directly to the Reader?
Note: This question was previously about breaking the fourth wall. I discovered that my interpretation of that phrase was wrong. I have therefore rewritten the question.
(The above is in place to explain the number of answers and comments about the fourth wall)
This question deals with an author pausing the story to speak directly to the reader. An example follows:
It is a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up. The days until the first task seemed to slip by [...] Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The first sentence is the pause in the story/narration. In the second sentence, the narration resumes. In my experience, this sort of thing is generally frowned upon by writers. The reader is there for the story, not your commentary.
That being said, I believe there are cases where this practice is fine. C.S. Lewis and E. Nesbit did it frequently in their books, and I was never bothered by it. On the contrary, I found it to only add to the story being told. I do believe that continuing to speak directly to the reader does hurt the novel, but in my experience, I've found short, to-the-point lines directly from the author to the reader only help the story. I myself have done this briefly, and my readers never mentioned it. Even J.K. Rowling does it occasionally.
All of this has led me to conclude that an author can pause the story and speak directly to the reader, as long as the passages are short, to the point, and do not overwhelm the story, but add to it.
Is this an accurate conclusion? If not, why? Please provide evidence of shared opinion.
1 answer
I think your premise is a little flawed here. The convention of the novel since its inception is that the narrative is addressed by the narrator to the reader, and that the narrator is free to relate events or to comment on them as they see fit. There is no fourth wall in the novel; there are no walls at all. That, indeed, is it greatest artistic virtue.
The tendency of the narrator to withdraw into the shadows is a quite recent phenomenon that seems to date from the time when the cinema began to be a significant cultural force and writers like Graham Greene started to experiment with cinematic techniques in their novels.
Some people like to make this into an absolute doctrine of the novel form today, and "show don't tell" has become a shorthand and rather unthinking form of dismissal for all kind of lazy writing, to the point where it has been inflated by some into an iron law of literature.
And yet is it easy enough to demonstrate that popular modern novelists continue to use the narrative voice that has been with us since Cervantes, and arguably since the Gospels or even Homer. Yes, there is more use of cinematic techniques in contemporary novels, as the cinema has become perhaps the dominant cultural form of our day. But it has not extinguished the narrator's voice, and nor should it. The novel form would lose much of its artistic power and distinctive cultural role without it. (There is a reason the book is almost always better than the movie!)
There are no walls for the novelist and you are free to use the narrative voice appropriately in your work. Just don't let it become an excuse for lazy writing.
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