In fiction, theater, and film, there is a narrative convention called the fourth wall. It is an imaginary barrier between the characters and the audience. The characters and the story play out without any awareness that an audience exists.
The fourth wall has its origins in theater, where three physical walls (right, left, rear) make up the stage, and the invisible wall stands between the cast and the audience.
Sometimes a writer chooses to shatter the illusory fourth wall. When a narrator or character in any fictional work directly addresses the reader or audience, or when a character admits to the reader or audience that they exist only in a fictional world, the fourth wall is broken.
“Jane Eyre,” by Charlotte Brontë, is an example of the narrator breaking the fourth wall: “Reader, I married him.”
In “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” by John Fowles, the narrator steps in to discuss the nature of fiction-writing itself, even offering multiple endings.
Woody Allen’s character in his film “Annie Hall” frequently turns to address the audience, and even argues with other characters about the audience’s perception.
Breaking the fourth wall can be an interesting narrative technique, so I picked up a novel that’s been getting a lot of attention recently: “Five,” by Ilona Bannister. It’s billed as a twisty page-turner, and I settled in for some easy reading entertainment.
The concept is fascinating: the novel introduces five people waiting for a train at a London subway station, and the narrator directly addresses the reader and says that one of them will die in the next five minutes. Not only that, the narrator asks us which one we think should die, and in doing so implicates the reader in a moral calculus of who deserves to survive.
There’s a child, his mother, a gambler, an old woman, and a businessman to choose from. The narrative alternates between the scene on the train platform and longer sections that focus on each character in turn. All of them are damaged in their own ways; none of them are particularly the type a reader will root for. Oh, how to choose which one we prefer to die?
The narrator also tells us what to pay attention to: “Review everyone’s position. Tell us what they might do next. Consider what you know that they do not . . .”
And after the mother has an awful thought about her sociopathic son, the author writes, “Pause here for a moment. Please do not judge this mother for having this thought.”
And yet all along we’re being told to judge. We’re being forced into active complicity. I found it patronizing and obnoxious. It was clear to me the narrator didn’t like the characters or the reader.
At the same time, Bannister demonstrates serious writing chops. Here are the thoughts of a woman trying to continue living after her husband was killed in a bicycle accident:
Her husband cooked. He made fresh pasta from scratch and knew how to roast a chicken and understood things about steak. She has not eaten any of those things since he died. The thought of him, of a dishcloth on his shoulder, his head bowed, his face in profile slicing garlic or squeezing a lemon, stops her breathing. She literally cannot breathe if she picks up pasta, chicken, steak, lemon, or garlic in the supermarket, if she tries to nonchalantly put them in her shopping trolley like they are just food and not granite rubble filling her pockets to weigh her down while she drowns in the river of her grief.
But the passages of strong writing get overshadowed by the gimmicky concept as the train bears down on the station and we have to wonder who will die. I didn’t really care who died. I didn’t even care to guess. And so the book, despite being engrossing and original in many ways, ultimately disappoints.
