Today's #flashfiction Who Built The Fourth Wall

“My eyes are up here.”

Medusa* #quote

Labor Day is coming up. Since you don't work on Labor Day shouldn't it be Break Day? Anyway onto the flash fiction!

Who Built The Fourth Wall

         In stories there's something called the fourth wall. Some of you may know this term. It's the barrier between the audience and the characters, and when the character addresses the audience and admits they are in a story they are breaking the fourth wall.

But the real question is, who built the fourth wall?

         We couldn't know the person's name, man or woman, it must have been one of the first storytellers. One of the first people that sat down all those years when language first sprung into being in the ancient times and they gathered around campfires or in caves to tell stories.

         The first person who came up with some characters, or maybe just one, they just had to be fictional, and set them on some fictitious journey. Back then they may have been hunters that story teller wanted to exist just so he could possibly be them. Maybe a hero he wished would exist in a time of crisis.

         And when this story came to be he had to have created such a scenario so emotionally engaging that the readers could feel like they were actually observing characters in some way. Back then they really didn't have walls. But a forth wall was created. A wall of the imagination that the audience stood behind and watched the characters behind and the storyteller let it all unfold. Whatever hunters and heroes he created or whatever figments of his imagination.

         This storyteller built that wall and we keep building that wall today, and breaking it down, when we need to. Maybe just for our characters to do a quick joke to the camera or the reader. Hey, there's a crack in the wall of this story. I should patch it up later.