Direct-to-camera address in Fleabag merges narrator and character, abolishing retrospection

Evidence

Beyond simply looking, Fleabag also uses a vocative device of the second-person pronoun, hailing the camera as subject. The “you” is expansive, suggesting a generic audience, the specific dead friend Boo, or Fleabag addressing herself. Creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge emphasizes in her published script that the intent was to highlight the relationship with the audience: “The main focus of the process was her direct relationship with her audience and how she tries to manipulate and amuse and shock them, moment to moment, until she eventually bares her soul.” Directness, moment-to-momentness, bareness: these are the immediatist effects the show’s creator pursued. … Crucially, as in the flow of this conversation with the therapist, the direct address in Fleabag does not break the diegetic interaction; unlike Saved by the Bell’s signature “Time out!” sequences, the conversation proceeds and there are no freeze-frames or action pauses. The flow is continuous, the divulgences not retrospective but present tense. If first-person narrative in literature often involves the gap between the narrator “I” and the character “I” who experienced what is subsequently narrated (a gap, as we saw in “Writing,” that often shutters in the short time span and present tense of autofiction), the first-person forward-facing camera closes that gap, producing an identity or indistinction between the two. This gapless immanentism, momentariness, and enmeshment is immediacy. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 223

Categorization

• XREF: The narrator-‘I’/character-‘I’ gap collapsing in Fleabag’s camera address directly parallels the autofiction gap analysis the reader already traced in the Writing chapter.