. Spinning .

Opening the story in the first person pov, we are hearing from a man about an experience in his past that tells us right in the first sentence: “I still get nightmares.”

What follows as an introduction is the setting up of an event where the narrator was seeking a place to live, was told by his friend of an availability in his building when a resident, Zampano, dies, and the unsettling exploration of the man’s room after his death by natural causes. So we’re getting the idea that there is a scary mystery involved and this is where it is focused. We also know that no matter how frightened the narrator is, he is alive to tell the story.

The typeface is large, bold, different; obviously meant to appear as a personal entry by the narrator as typed on a regular typewriter. This intimacy with the reader is heightened by another break in the fourth wall:

Truth be told, I was still having a hard time taking my eyes off the scarred floor. I even reached out to touch the protruding splinters.

What did I know then? What do I know now? At least some of the horror I took away at four in the morning you now have before you, waiting for you a little like it waited for me that night, only without these few covering pages. (p. xvii)

So Danielewski reached further through the wall not only by the narrator speaking to the reader, but by suggesting that they are truly sharing this experience but that thanks to his foresight, the narrator is granting the reader an edge by this introduction.

Interesting.

As a prelude to a posting on Blindness regarding reality and symbolism, this idea popped into my head and since it didn't quite relate, I'm posting it here.

The Fourth Wall* in literature and any artistic expression–particularly drama–is the barrier between the storyworld and the reader or audience. It's a fascinating concept that separates the spectator from the action and yet even more interesting when it is broken by the story to invite the audience in.

Something that's bothered me for years in television sitcoms is the family meal scenario where all members of the family are spread around the table–no matter what number–except for the side facing the viewer. I always thought this was rather silly and unreal until I realized that situation comedies usually are performed live, play-style, in front of an audience. To place someone on this side of the table would necessarily require an actor to have his back to the audience. I'm sure that the audience doesn't realize the effect, and yet watching this on the TV, when we're used to camera angles that can achieve a balance around the table rather than a set stage static viewpoint, it looks odd and unreal.

The 3-sided table then, is a subtle invitation to the audience by acknowledging its existence outside of the storyworld, thus breaking that barrier of the fourth wall.

*Note: Notice that a Spinning post is Reference #5 in Wikipedia and I didn't place it there.

The naked Margarita is happily flying on her broom above the apartment house where she’s wreaked havoc on Latunsky’s apartment and is smashing windows in every other when through a window she spots a small boy in bed, evidently frightened. She flys in to comfort him. "It’s just some boys breaking windows," she tells him.

"I’ll tell you a fairy tale," said Margarita, and put her burning hand on top of the boy’s close-cropped head.  "Once upon a time there was a lady.  She had no children, and no happiness either.  And at first she cried for a long time, but then she became wicked…" Margarita fell silent, and took her hand away—the boy was sleeping.  (p. 206)

Margarita, turned into a witch by the devil in exchange for information about her lover, has forsaken all the reality of her former life, her nice but uninspiring husband, her finery; everything that it would seem a large portion of Russian women would give their eyeteeth to have.  But for Margarita, it is freedom to be, to love, to seek justice and revenge.  Evidently, tippy-toeing around wasn’t Margarita’s chosen style and flying nude on a broom may be what she’s repressed all her life.  Repression, the Russian way of life for its citizens at that time.  Yet she’s still retained the heart of a woman as she offers some comfort to the little boy who’s a stranger to her.

One other thing I caught in this book (besides a double "the" on p. 207) was another tear in the fourth wall:

Margarita stepped back and said with dignity, "Go to the devil’s mother.  What do you mean, Claudine?  Mind who you’re talking to," and, after a second’s thought, she added a long, unprintable oath.  All this had a sobering effect on the thoughtless fat man." (p. 210)

Note "a long unprintable oath." This, dear reader, is directed to us.

In third person omniscient point of view the reader is privy to all going on, anywhere, depending upon the narrator’s movement through the structure of story and of course, reliant upon that narrator’s opinion of events and situations.

Bulgakov eases us from third person to first as he has previously described Margarita’s thoughts, but adds:

–what did she want?  I do not know  I have no idea.  Evidently she spoke the truth when she said it was the Master she needed and not the Gothic-style house, the private garden, or the money.  She loved him, she was telling the truth.  (p. 186)

Bulgakov has followed the proper form of third person, switched to first, then surprises us with this:

Even I, a truthful narrator, but a detached observer nonetheless, feel my heart contract when I think of what Margarita went through the next day when she came to the Master’s house and found that he was no longer there.  Fortunately, she had not as yet had a talk with her husband, who had not come home when he was supposed to. (p. 186)

Allowing the narrator a persona has added the single touch of emotion that all the drama and bizarre events did not offer, being written in a style of near-reportative fashion, a matter-of-fact totally in conflict with the surreality of the story. 

Then Bulgakov moves forward, taking on and breaking the literary fourth wall:

All of this was absurd of course, since how would her staying with the Master that night have made things any different?  Could she really have saved him?  "Nonsense!" we would have exclaimed, but not in front of a woman who has been driven to despair.  (p. 186)

With that simple technique–first asking a question of the reader, one that might also have been considered a first person pov thought instead–then the statement of what we would have exclaimed, Bulgakov has the narrator make contact with the reader and connects with him in a convivial "we." This step by step method manages to first show the reader that the narrator is indeed a person and a caring, compassionate one, but also allows that the reader is the same.

Very nicely done.

(WARNING: Not only spoilers–as all my postings on lit may be, though my readings of past classics are not as threatening to the general populace as a recently published book such as this might be, but then again, who hasn’t read this book already?–but some rather blunt remarks about McCarthy’s inclusion of rather upsetting images for which those of us who love McCarthy have sworn acceptance.)

Nobody does dead babies like McCarthy.  If that seems a rough statement, just watch the news at night.  Not just Iraq or whatever current war with its visuals, but the boyfriend who didn’t think his girlfriend’s baby was just too cute to ever…well, you know.

What bothers me the most–and the whole scenario is meant to disturb–is that McCarthy let the boy walk right into it and the man and I let it happen!

The boy forgets to bring the gun and they must go back for it; the father tells him it’s not his fault, he should have been watching. The boy doesn’t shut off the gas valve on the stove and they run out of fuel; the father again accepts the blame and assures the boy it wasn’t his responsibility.  As the boy takes on more and more, sees worse and worse horror, we forget how fragile he really is.

We were supposed to be watching over him and I, for one, feel I’ve let him down horribly.  Lulled into the sense of seeing death and obvious signs of cannibalism, remembering that dog barking in the beginning pages, we let the kid–as does McCarthy because he sees the purpose to it–walk right up to that campfire.

As I see the real possibility of this world, I see as well how I might act in it.  That’s immersion.  That’s fear.

I’ve rooted for a character before, I’ve warned him not to open a door.  Never before, however, have I waited as he passed a light over a discovery and looked him in the eye in that moment of awe of discovery.

He turned and looked at the boy crouched above him blinking in the smoke rising up from the lamp and then he descended to the lower steps and sat and held the lamp out. Oh my God, he whispered.  Oh my God.  (p. 116)

As reader, I am immersed totally in this grey world which McCarthy has so carefully plotted to make me aware of by his persistance of language. When there is a new stretch of landscape I check the ashes for footprints before the man does.  I don’t have complete trust in his abilities; he’s tired, worn, overwhelmed by responsibility.

We watch out for the man.  Me and the boy.