Direct Address, Intrusive Narrator (Writing a Novel)

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Direct Address, Intrusive Narrator

As we explored in a previous article, a work of fiction is most often presented to us as if it were not a work of fiction or imagination at all, but rather a series of events unfolding in front of our eyes in reality. It is obvious that the words on the page in front of us have been written down by an individual, carefully considered to create certain effects, and then rammed through a printing press and reproduced thousands or even millions of times. However, whenever we read a good novel, we get the distinct impression that the words on the page are speaking to us specifically, and that the realm which comes to occupy our imagination exists. This is the great deception of the novel, and the reason for its success.

One of the reasons the illusion of the novel is so easy to believe is that novels tend to make clear and inviolable distinctions between the different worlds, real and fictional, that must exist for a story to come to be experienced. The majority of novels are written in the third-person, and omniscience is a common feature of most narrators, meaning that we are told the story not from the perspective of an individual, but rather from a position in time and space outside of personhood altogether. It is as if the story were telling itself, since the narrating agent makes no reference to herself nor to the act of writing the story. The novel unfolds like a natural phenomenon rather than a completely artificial human construction.

In the case of I narration or narration done in the third-person by a character in the world of the story, a different approach is used but the effect is largely the same. The narrator in these cases often uses references to self, but they are firmly situated in their own worlds, and we get the feeling that we are looking in on them as they are recalling events that were important to them. There is no mention made of the production of the book we are reading, and there is no acknowledgement that the world of the story and the world of the reader are distinct and exist on entirely different ontological levels. The real world and the world of the text are kept apart, and so no collision ruining the illusion of the novel is possible.

There are some novels, however, that decide very deliberately to destroy the illusion that most novels try so hard to maintain. In them, the narrator talks to the reader directly, and treats her as a reader. This is known as direct address, and serves to chip away at, or at least to expose, the divisions between the textual world and the real world, as in the following example: "Come with me on a journey, gentle reader, as I lead you down a path strewn with snare and brambles. I have written it especially for you, and I hope you will find it as entertaining to travel as I did to create."

Direct address is a favorite device of many postmodern authors who desire to lay bare the trappings of their fictions to appeal to their readers on a different level, and who desire to tell a story as much about their telling the story as about the traditional content of the story itself. A narrator who does this frequently in a novel is known as an intrusive narrator, which just shows how unusual this practice is; apparently, the narrator is supposed to remain invisible and personally uninvolved in the unfolding of the story, making any self-references intrusions on the real action of the story. The intrusive narrator is often productive of humor in the novel, and while this is not always the case, most times the involved narrating agent cannot help injecting a little mirth into the veins of his or her story.