73
Is there a name for when the narrator (in a literary text) talks to the reader directly?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
73 points (98.7% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35806 readers
1644 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I believe that's called narration.
I think that might be too broad for what OP is asking, though I don't know the answer. Their example has the narrator directly addressing the audience in a manner that acknowledges the existence of a reader for them to be addressing. Specifically they refer to a "you" which would be the reader. It's a bit like the term "4th wall breaking" in cinema although not quite the same as that either. Just "narration" means an entity, be it a character, or the author, or voice of God is telling the story and as it says in your link, is something present in all written literary works, but they won't necessarily acknowledge their audience, which is the unique characteristic they're trying to identify.
How about the term “aside”?
Another comment said it.
I guess only OP could tell us if that sounds like what they were talking about but I don't think that would be it either. That appears to be a device for theatre, which solves the problem of revealing characters' thoughts when the medium would make that otherwise difficult because of the absence of a narrator. In theatre (or film or other visual mediums), a narrator is optional and if a playwright doesn't opt to use one then it can create a problem that an aside can fix, but in literature a narrator is a prerequisite and so the problem isn't there for an aside to fix and characters' thoughts can be transmitted through narration freely if the author chooses and there isn't a need for an acknowledgement of the reader in doing so.
It most likely is. I know we colloquially would refer to this as breaking the 4th wall but I don't know the real terminology for this in written literature. I do like all of the various answers everyone has provided. It's made for some interesting reading.