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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29178
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29178
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 30