Self-reference is probably one of the more overused, and often delightful, tropes of post-modernism. Taken in the loosest possible terms, self-reference acknowledges the audience, and may tell the audience something about what they're feeling as they read the book (or watch the movie, or play the game). It doesn't quite break the guidelines of the story, but it leans on them enough for the reader to feel a little bit uncomfortable.
Failing that, it at least spices up the action somewhat.
Case in point: The Hunger Games is about the world's most brutal reality show. And right away, that's a comment on the readers, right? Reality shows have become one of the most popular television genres of the last decade, so most of today's readers are going to nod to themselves and say, "Yup, I might be watching this." Everybody in this dystopian future watches The Hunger Games live, as they unfold -- the poor districts have to watch it, but the richer districts that really get pleasure out of it are portrayed as rich, pompous assholes who don't care if a few children live or die.
The constraints of this particular reality show are these: In order for all the districts to remember who's in power (and I can't recall who is, but never mind, just call them Big Brother), each one must give one boy and one girl to the Games every year, and the kids (ages 12 to 18) must fight to the death. I'm speechless at how bad of an idea this is: it's supposed to remind the districts who's in charge, in order to keep them from starting a revolution, but sacrificing children just seems like it would hurt Big Brother more than help them, and indeed there are hints that a revolution might come in the next two books of the series. But the violent nature of the Games gives Suzanne Collins a few opportunities for very shocking moments. People are regularly starving or suffering from fatal wounds, and one character whom I and the protagonist both liked very much was killed without a second thought halfway through the book.
The protagonist's internal monologue focuses mostly on strategy, which is often necessary in the games, but sometimes feels excessively indulgent; she wards herself against threats that never come and don't seem plausible. She also ignores most emotions for other members of the Games, which comes back to bite her in the butt later on, both in terms of plot and in terms of me considering her more as a robot than a human.
The book always focuses on what isn't there. Kids in the Games perform for cameras; the protagonist wonders about what her crush at home thinks when she starts snogging the other guy from her district; and that strategy of hers is always thinking about where the other players are, and in what state. This gives a huge sense of isolation, and as a writer I felt cheated when perfectly interesting areas were mentioned and subsequently not explored. For example, there was a tall strong character who took up hiding in a reedy swamp, which sounded very interesting, but he was quickly dispatched offscreen.
This lets Suzanne Collins focus on the relationship (staged or not) between the protagonist and her district-mate, and this, I think, is where the book is compared to Twilight. I was a little disappointed that the book resorted to this, actually. There's plenty of action, but it all essentially centers around romance in act three, which gives the author a good chance to not resolve anything at the end.
Oh, the ending. Alfred Hitchcock had a saying. When a bomb goes off, it's shock. When a bomb is ticking, it's suspense. The Hunger Games ends with a ticking bomb - and no clue as to whether or not it will go off. Not only that, but it's a little uncertain as to whether there's a bomb at all. The protagonist has been overly cautious before, and it's entirely plausible that the ticking we're hearing is only a pocketwatch. I'm not sure whether to condemn or praise the book for this, because it's always nice to end with a little ambiguity -- see also Inception, my favorite movie of the year.
But then I remember that the suspense had nothing to do with the last words of the book, which were as follows: End of Book One. I've already talked a lot about sequels on this blog; do I really have to do so again? I understand how new authors might want to market their first book as a first installment of a trilogy, but Suzanne Collins doesn't even have that excuse; she's already a bestseller! The point of the suspenseful ending was just to get you to buy another book, and I feel cheated by that. If Eoin Colfer and Neil Gaiman can write their books with a little closure, then dagnabbit, other books can. Please stop doing this, youth authors!
Anyway, I can't complain about that because I'm not really the target audience. I was the target audience for Mogworld, though, and I'm not quite sure how to take that. Unfortunately, for the self-reference to work, you have to be in the target audience. Mogworld is essentially about an online role-playing fantasy game world gone awry, seen from the inside. (Oh, come on, that's not a spoiler; it's given away on the fragging cover.) So you're reading about your own actions as viewed by Non-Player Characters, and they all see the heroes of their world as pompous assholes who walk and talk very stiffly.
This isn't that new of an idea, but on the other hand, I can't remember the last time I read a book with a zombie protagonist, and it provides for hilarious results. The character is killed or maimed often without feeling pain, but keeps returning to his body, so it's very much like the author recreated the feeling of a game without actually incorporating a lives system. Not quite a MMORPG game, though; it's more like an adventure game feel. The protagonist in this case is trying to figure out what exactly is wrong with his world, and the finale is a climb up a mountain, rather than defeating a big baddie. Now that's mixed messages if I ever saw them.
The author is a game reviewer I watch often: Yahtzee Croshaw of The Escapist's Zero Punctuation. He's notable for his hilarious metaphors and pessimism, and it comes through in this book, as I expected. I didn't expect him to be so good at plotting and pacing, but he is. Each of the book's four parts is a self-contained little chunk that builds on the previous one until the climax. Occasionally he introduces too many plot threads at one time, and it becomes obvious that one will help to clean up the other, but his main character is so funny that I didn't mind.
I did mind when that main character was dropped off a bridge at the end, though, and then resurrected a few times. There are plenty of books and movies that do this, where the protagonist is reverted at the end to the state he began the book in, and that defeats the purpose of the novel for me. Sure, the zombie has obviously learned something in the final scene, when he makes a crucial decision that alters his future, but he's lost any relationships or philosophies he gained along the path of the book, and as a reader I feel cheated.
I felt cheated by Stephen King in his latest batch of stories, too. He uses self-reference to spice up his novels, and I'm sad to say that that's the last thing he should be doing. I read 'Salem's Lot a few years back and thought that the worst part about it was how King kept referencing the original Dracula story, at which point it became frightfully easy to predict every single thing that would happen. The horror was removed and replaced by dreary predictability.
Well, he does almost the same thing in Full Dark, No Stars. His prose remains masterful (but what else is new?), but his stories lack spark. In order, we have a murdered ghost story, a rape revenge, a deal with the devil, and a serial rapist husband. Those aren't stories, they're situations. I'm reminded of the time after the writer's strike when I sat in movie theaters and watched trailers that basically went: "This one is about a long distance relationship", or "This one is about robots". Anyone and their dog could come up with a plot for those movies, and the same goes for Stephen King.
I'll bet anyone's dog could think of a better ending than King, though. One's pretty good, one makes no sense, and two basically summarize what came before and send the reader packing. What happened to the great climax of Under the Dome? And furthermore, what about King's trademark bleak endings? In three of four stories, the protagonists get exactly what they want. What fun is that? I mean, King, I know you have to write happy endings sometimes to make it more dramatic when the hero dies, but you don't have to make it so saccharine! (For a horror story, I mean.)
Self-reference in FDNS just reminds us that we could be reading better books or watching better movies, while in The Hunger Games it points at the reader and laughs. There's a bit in Games when the protagonist snogs her boyfriend, then says to herself, "I'll bet the audience will get a kick out of this!" It's bits like these when we realize why there are no cameras visible in the Games: this book is the camera, and we are the Games's intended audience. Collins likes to lean on the proverbial Fourth Wall, and question our ideas of violence as entertainment, or other peoples' romance as a hot-button issue. In FDNS, the references to movies or books just fall flat.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what the self-reference to gamers in Mogworld was trying to do. The idea is that the humans create such super-powered artificial intelligence that it becomes self-aware, which is always a good problem to consider, but doesn't apply yet to game worlds. Moving the camera's spotlight from a hero to a protagonist, though, helps us consider that every person we meet has a backstory, and is on some sort of quest. A good sentiment, but it was less about the reader. Well, anyway, it was interesting.
Self-reference can be a blessing or a curse, or a bad metaphor (like the one I just finished). It appears to be here to stay in the post-modern era, but once you've broken down the fourth wall, do you have to create a fifth one just to break it down?
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