A fiction writer, a dramatist, etc. wants to make his world real for you. He wants you to "get into" his characters and events and think of them as if they were really unfolding before your eyes. (I can't think of the term for this. 'Suspension of disbelief," perhaps?)

But once in a great while an author deliberately steps back and slyly reminds you that it's not real; that you're sitting in your chair with a book in your hand, reading.

You'll see that in last Sunday's Brenda Starr comic strip, where an intruder breaks into a funeral and screams at an older lady, "The game's over, Mother!" The woman's companion asks her, "Why does he keep calling you 'Mother'?"

She replies, "Must be short for an expletive unfit for a family newspaper." The author is reminding you that this very moment, you're reading this in a family newspaper, in which he cannot say, 'Mother-f**ker'."

Is there a term for this literary device?

I don't know, wordnerd. I have seen similar situations where the writer informs the reader that he/she (not they!) is reading the comics, and it really is rather startling because you normally aren't thinking about real life when you read them. I think it is quite clever.

In film it's called 'direct address' when a character addresses the audience. For comics, I propose the term 'strange interlude', in honor of Eugene O'Neill's play and MAD magazine's 'A Strange Interlude with Hazel'.

Apostrophe is the rhetorical term used for a passage that turns away from the subject to address an absent person or thing.

I am pretty sure I've also seen the word used for a character's actions in the context given by wordnerd.

Apostrophe is the rhetorical term used for a passage that turns away from the subject to address an absent person or thing.

Yes, most of our punctuation terms come from rhetoric, e.g., colon (limb, member, metrical unit), period (circuit), parenthesis (insertion).

Perhaps "antiverisimilitude"?

'extradiegetic commentary'?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Virge,

A friend of mine has recently been studying narrative. She provided this link.
"Breaching the Fourth Wall" is the expression.

Fascinating link, Virge. There may be distinctions to be drawn here.

In Wordnerd's example this technique is used a sudden shock to the reader, yanking him out of the story and back to reality.

Sometimes a character speaks directly to the audience, but in a way to draw them into the story, not to remind them that they are outside it. The best example I can think of is the Narrator character in Thorton Wilder's Our Town. There may be something of the same effect when a character solilquizes. Think of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy; particularly, imagine it as if Hamlet looked directly at you as he spoke.

Sometimes an author throughout his work speaks in a way that reminds readers that they are "outside the book". In that case, no particular instance stands out and jars the audience out of its suspension of disbelief. Fielding's novel Tom Jones, and when it was made into a movie, the film makers kept the same tone by having a narrator who speaks to the audience throughout.

Finally, in quite a few plays, at the very end, a character brings speaks directly to the audience to transition them back to the real world. Puck does this to end Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. ["If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber'd here / While these visions did appear. / ... So, good night unto you all. / Give me your hands, if we be friends, / And Robin shall restore amends."] A few of Shakespeare's other plays also end this way, I think.

Interesting how many variants there are of this technique. Virge, I wish I were acquainted with more of the examples listed in your link.

It's interesting how the development of Western drama goes from directly addressing the audience (think Greek chorus) to indirectly (think protagonist and antagonist discoursing). Even when you have a narrator there's still an author behind him/her.

There's a cute part in The Frogs where the character of Dionysus asks "his" priests for some help. Kind of like Bugs Bunny breaking the fourth wall to ask if there's a doctor in the house.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: jheem,

Yes, shufitz, there is a distinction between breaching the fourth wall and the situation wordnerd describes. One tries to draw the audience into the imagined reality, the other draws attention to the fact that the wall exists.

Another practice (but again wide of wordnerd's mark) of yanking an audience out of a story and back to their own reality is often used as a tool for motivating change. At the end of a story, the audience or reader is made aware that the story was allegoric and contained criticism of things they had been doing. Here it usually doesn't attempt to draw attention to the viewers' current environment, but to their lives outside.