POVs, omniscient narration, and... and...

[Bramblethorn]

I remember that. As I recall, Tolkien adopts that habit in his Hobbit Prologue but not anywhere else in the trilogy. The way I read it, it gives it a folsky, casual tone. It's like Tolkien is settling down with you to tell you a story by the fireplace and he's giving you a few words of explanation before he starts the main story, and once he gets started he sheds that style.

Not sure if you mean that as in "the prologue to The Hobbit" or if you're counting the entire book as a prologue to LotR there. Tolkien uses those interjections here and there throughout The Hobbit, more at the beginning but not only there. I think you're right that he doesn't use it in LotR; one of several stylistic shifts between those two works.

It's an example of the narrator breaking the wall, but not the character breaking the wall. If the narrator does it, is it really breaking the wall? (I'm not sure).

Ah, I get you. Characters breaking the wall...hmm. Quite a bit of it in drama, if soliloquys count. But in prose?

Could be argued that it happens a lot by accident, when an author gives their character a heavy-handed rant about politics/religion/etc. and it gets just a little too obvious that the intent is to preach at the reader rather than merely to portray a fictional scene. Blundering through the fourth wall, I guess?

I've seen it done intentionally in comic writing on occasion. Context on this one: Midnight Pals is a series of dialogues between famous horror writers (King, Poe, Koontz, Lovecraft, Barker, Shelley as the regulars, countless guest appearances):

Barron: you know who else was at this event? that clueless boomer dad Steve K
King: haha this steve k sounds like a real loser!
Koontz:
Lovecraft:
Poe:
Barker:
Barker: steve-
Poe: no no let him figure it out for himself
Poe: he'll get there in the end
King: hey wait a second!! are these characters based on us?
Barron: i didn't say that
Barron: if you recognize asshole Clive B or lovable dog-obsessed doofus Dean K as eerily reminiscent of people in your life, well, that's just an amazing coincidence
King: that is a pretty amazing coincidence
King: laird, you can't just do that!
King: you can't just make up fictional characters based on famous horror writers and then just put silly words in their mouths to make fun of them!
Barron:
Barker:
Poe:
Lovecraft:
Koontz:
Barron: damn how meta can you get

I don't know quite where it fits in this discussion, but one of the weirder examples of fourth-wall-breaking was Heyne Verlag, a F/SF publisher who handled the German editions of Pratchett, Star Trek novelisations, and various others. They used to make some extra money by inserting product placement in the German text, where the characters would suddenly develop a craving for delicious Maggi noodle soup and - dear reader, it's so easy to make, you just need five minutes and boiling water!

 

[RetroFan]

Have you ever written a first person story with an unreliable narrator?

It's quite an interesting challenge to do so. I've done it once in a Loving Wives story, and an Incest Taboo story with a partially unreliable narrator.

 

[SimonDoom]

Not sure if you mean that as in "the prologue to The Hobbit" or if you're counting the entire book as a prologue to LotR there. Tolkien uses those interjections here and there throughout The Hobbit, more at the beginning but not only there. I think you're right that he doesn't use it in LotR; one of several stylistic shifts between those two works.

I misunderstood you. I thought you were referring to the Prologue "Concerning Hobbits" at the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring. I just pulled it off the shelf and see it does not contain the language you referred to. But it DOES break the wall a bit in the way the narrator refers to the reading audience. The narrator refers to Hobbits as being "relatives of ours." This casual style is dropped once the novel proper begins.

 

[Britva415]

Usually, but not necessarily. How about this:

Sam closed the door of his house behind him, sighed, and looked at you, the reader.

"What a crappy day. I hope you had more fun reading about it than I did experiencing it."


In this case both the narrator and main character, in third person, are breaking the wall.

Admittedly, this sounds rather ridiculous.

It sounds uncomfortably close to the insufferable second-person pov.

 

[intim8]

I find that an omniscient narrator is a great way to set the stage for sci-fi and fantasy. Present a scene, provide the local colour, then zoom in on your character, first from the outside and then shifting to their close perspective.

Yeah, very typical approach, because it is solid and reliable. SFF readers are a little different. They don't need an 'inciting incident', they're the type of readers that are there for big worlds and big ideas. They enjoy seeing the scope before the details. Maybe more true for SF than F, but there's a reason those two are always lumped together.

 

[intim8]

Here's another category. The personality/presence of the narrator. Are they a presence, or are they unnoticed except for their way with words? Is there a term for this category?

Not sure if there is a term for it generally, but it is definitely a thing. Often the narrator is a character themselves, even if they aren't part of the action. There is a term for one variety of it: "unreliable narrator", in which the narrator lies to the reader.

 

[AG31]

There is a term for one variety of it: "unreliable narrator",

Of course. Good point.

 

[AG31]

Back when I was an A student at a prestigous college I could have made up examples of what I'm talking about in no time. Alas those days are gone.

Well, it took me 24 hours, but I think I have a pair of examples.

Present narrator
John stupidly started up the stairs, forgetting the lessons he should have learned from those slasher movies in his youth.

Absent narrator
John ignored flashes of scenes from the slasher movies of his youth and proceeded up the stairs.

New question. Does anyone ever adopt the first style in real life writing?

 

[Britva415]

Not sure if there is a term for it generally, but it is definitely a thing. Often the narrator is a character themselves, even if they aren't part of the action. There is a term for one variety of it: "unreliable narrator", in which the narrator lies to the reader.

Even orthogonally to the "reliability" factor, every narrator has an individualized voice and can't help but portray theirself in a way which conveys "personality." Even if the narrator is 100% outside the story, they're still telling it, and become personified to some degree.

Some authors really lean into that. Tom Robbins is an author who I feel remained third-person and personally outside of the action, but, told stories in such an animated and demonstrative way that, like him or not, his narrator "voice" was totally inseparable from the story. His narrator didn't always explain how or why they came to know the story, came to know the characters, and became motivated to tell the story to readers, but, these were narrators who had stakes in the stories, in how they told them, in expressing them in their particular personal individualized way.