: Re: 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"?

@XinRu607

Vote Up Vote Down

Mark Twain made a brief and cheeky aside of this nature during the famous painting scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that went like this (emphasis mine):

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.

Twain doesn't leave the fourth wall unscathed, but left it more scratched or dented than broken.

(0)

Login to post a comment!