Consider the Footnote: Why Don’t More Authors Use This Powerful Tool?

Whether you deem an “experimental” or “postmodern” novel a success depends on what you get out of it: entertainment and awe? Or rage and frustration, and the lingering desire for a refund? While a traditional story well-told, will always succeed on at least one fundamental level, an experimental novel can fail a million times, in spectacular ways3. For every The Mezzanine, a book that inventively plays with reader expectations and traditional structures4, there are a dozen attempts that emerge from their author’s laptops practically begging us to perform a mercy killing. Even then, some of the most reviled novels will always have their fans. No literary experiment can ever be a complete failure5.
Naturally, some are more successful than others. Found a new way to structure your novel so the sequence of events is a complex, jeweled puzzle box? Fantastic! Figured out how to write a novel without using the letter “E”? Slightly less exciting, though certainly impressive. One service these books render is to identify new tools and techniques that can be appropriated by less-cutting edge authors and repurposed, slowly subsumed into the standard toolbox.
How this applies in the literary world: a hundred years ago, genius authors began experimenting with stream-of-consciousness narratives; a century later, every high school kid with literary ambitions ponderously writes a stream-of-consciousness story and feels super smart, though all they’ve done is taken a tool that was forged for them decades earlier and used it (probably very, very poorly6).
Writers use a lot of tricks to forge new ground in their fiction. They play with typesetting and fonts and design, breaking free of the constraints of language. They enforce arbitrary constraints on themselves to push themselves to think in different patterns. They borrow techniques and lietmotifs from other cultures. One favored trick is the use of tools and styles of academia and research: the formal language, the list of references, the deeply researched and realistically rendered background information, and other physical facets of a report or journal article7. And one of the most interesting and powerful tools popularized by fiction writers of the 20th and 21st centuries is the footnote (or endnote). In fact, the footnote is possibly one of the most powerful, flexible storytelling tools absorbed into the novelist’s toolbox in recent years8. They can be used in a wide variety of ways to produce a wide variety of effects, grounding the story in reality or undermining its moorings. They can add depth or complexity, mislead or clarify9. The footnote is a powerful, thoroughly postmodern device in fiction.
Which leads to the question: if this is how it works, then how come it is so seldom used?
The Power of the Footnote
The footnote’s power derives from its disruptive nature10. When you read fiction, you’re allowing yourself to be fooled. If it’s written in the first-person, you believe you’re privy to the point-of-view character’s thoughts and feelings. Third-person narratives are a bit easier; you can imagine you’re reading someone’s writings on a subject, or that the narrator’s voice is a godlike, all-seeing presence11.
Whatever the narrative scenario, you have to suspend disbelief to buy into it. A footnote or endnote drags you out of that trance and forces you to break the connection—essentially, it breaks the fourth wall12. This is one reason authors who use footnotes in their fiction are sometimes accused of showboating: the footnote can feel akin to a writer suddenly leaping into your room through a window and dancing around waving her arms, shouting “look at me! LOOK AT ME!” The footnote purposefully plays up the artificiality of the reading experience, allowing the author to intrude on their own narrative13.
In other words, it’s disruptive, and when used creatively can add an exciting energy to any story. Footnotes function in at least four distinct ways: providing supplementary information that goes beyond the narrator’s point of view, adding meta-commentary on the story itself, telling a completely distinct and separate story, and serving as simple entertainment.
World-Building

Some books, like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, use footnotes very traditionally. Christopher, the narrator, is very intelligent, but socially challenged and quite possibly somewhere on the autism spectrum, and his approach to his life is one of rigorous logic and deduction in place of the “normal” human abilities of empathy and reading social cues14. As a result, the book is littered with footnotes in which Christopher explains concepts and follows thoughts in logical—but often surprising—ways15. The footnotes are traditional in the sense of providing information to the reader that isn’t naturally found in the narrative, but they also serve a world-building function, in that they make the reading experience similar to Christopher’s own thought process, with his hyperactive imagination running in several directions at all times.
In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, the footnotes are also employed in world-building, but in a more general sense, expanding areas of the story and character backgrounds that are nonessential but enrich the experience. It’s entirely possible to read the novel while skipping the footnotes altogether, and the reader will not suffer any loss of comprehension in terms of plot16.
Separate but Equal

Footnotes are also used to explore related but wholly separate stories. Instead of merely providing interesting references or background information, or to better establish the world of the novel, the footnotes in books such as Nabokov’s Pale Fire or Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao actually offer additional narratives. In Pale Fire, the footnotes are ostensibly commentary and gloss on a lengthy poem by the fictitious poet John Shade, but in reality, they allow the author of the footnotes (the equally fictitious Charles Kinbote) to tell a rambling story of his own that involves Shade (whose poem he acquires after Shade’s murder), the deposed king of invented country Zembla, and an assassin hunting the king who accidentally kills Shade instead. Confused? Historically, you’re not alone. Nabokov uses footnotes to write a hypertextual book that can be read in a variety of ways: either as direct commentary on the poem itself, as a completely separate narrative read in order, or by jumping around from footnote to footnote, piecing the story together in whatever order appeals to you.
Diaz’s novel offers alternative narratives that are not exactly essential to the main story. They deepen and expand, continue the work of developing characters, and offer fascinating background information. However, reading the footnotes is in some sense optional—you can read the book without once referring to the footnotes and come away with a perfectly sound understanding of the story, the characters, the themes, and the allusions. What Diaz does by breaking much of the background information into footnote form is challenge the reader to consider the value of that information: how essential is it? If the primary story is clear and complete without footnotes, what do you lose by not reading them? Interestingly, the two portions of the book can be read separately: each describes a single world and a single story in different ways, from different angles, ultimately making both deeper and richer17.
Parallel Lines

Footnotes in novels like Infinite Jest and House of Leaves operate in entirely different ways. In Infinite Jest, the footnotes seem at first to function solely as universe-expanding background information. As the novel progresses, they become longer and more complex—eventually even the footnotes have footnotes—until we hit the infamous Footnote 324, which is seven pages of small type the length of an entire chapter if printed in normal-sized font. The footnotes in Infinite Jest are so numerous and varied in content, some of them begin to take on a wholly separate nature, more or less a parallel narrative that tells its own story18.
Wallace uses the footnotes (technically, endnotes, as they are gathered at the end of the book) to control the reading experience even more tightly than most authors. The author is always in charge, of course; they choose when to provide information, when to introduce characters and events—they control everything we experience as a reader. In Infinite Jest, Wallace goes one step further; he literally stops you whenever he thinks it prudent and forces you to go to the back of the book—to displace, reorient, and then follow his new line of thought for as long as he wants. It’s an exercise in control that’s remarkably powerful, especially when he takes you out of a complex story and leads you down a lengthy aside, only to dump you back where you left off. It’s a bit more ominous when you consider the novel’s Macguffin: the mysterious Entertainment no one can stop watching, shadowing the control Wallace is trying to exert over his readers19.

For the ultimate rabbit hole of footnotes, we turn to House of Leaves, in which Mark Z. Danielewski uses footnotes not simply to produce a disruptive effect, or exert control over his readers, but to purposefully build three distinct narratives—to make his book larger on the inside than it at first appears, as they would take up many more pages if set in the same typeface as the “main” plot. Consider that this is but the first sign the titular house is something more than a house—it’s measurably larger on the inside than should be possible—combined with the potential interpretation of the title House of Leaves as a metaphor for a book. Your head just exploded, and Danielewski is made happy.
Footnotes add dimension to fiction of all sorts (Wallace used them extensively in shorter works), and yet they aren’t used often. Reasons for this could be simple: they add a layer of formality that could prevent some readers from absorbing a story—passages that would be happily devoured if placed on the page in the perfect spot become homework assignments. And some folks regard footnotes in fiction as an affectation of postmodernists who value form over content, or who don’t mind being annoying.
The disruptive nature of the footnote is also an argument against it. As enriching as they are as a literary technique, not every tool is right for every job. Disruption can be enervating and exciting—but it can also be frustrating and distancing. Still, let’s take a moment to consider the eerie power of the footnote to transform and elevate a work of fiction.

1. As opposed to all those novelists who seek to tell a story badly, I suppose. I guess I’ll start apologizing for these sorts of things now.[back]
2. I don’t know about you, but I find novels that have contempt for me to be strangely exciting.[back]
3. Except as a doorstop, as almost every experimental novel ever written is approximately the size and mass of a small galaxy.[back]
4. Still waiting for the thrilling film adaptation of a novel that takes place entirely during an escalator ride from one floor to another. Soundtrack would be one piece of music. OSCARS HERE WE COME.[back]
5. Even this one.[back]
6. You can probably change that to certainly.[back]
7. As it turns out, academia says “right back at you” to fiction.[back]
8. If we’re discussing the Fifty Shades of Grey books, of course, the terms ‛powerful’ and ‛flexible’ have very different meanings. Also, now that we think about it, ‛absorbed.’[back]
9. They can also be used purely as entertainment, in the form of hilarious asides to the reader.[back]
10. See? Annoying, isn’t it.[back]
11. Much like the voice that urged me to write this essay, and keeps assuring me I am hilarious and also very smart.[back]
12. Except you, right here, right now, because you are reading an essay, not a book. Although science tells me that by this point it probably feels like you’ve been reading this forever.[back]
13. Trust me: This footnote idea felt clever when I started.[back]
14. In other words, he’s a writer. SELF BURN.[back]
15. In the theater adaptation of the novel, this is handled in a fun way by having Christopher promise to explain how he solved a particular test question after the play has ended. After the cast has taken their bows, Christopher bounds back onto the stage and regales the audience that has remained with a spirited explanation of a geometry problem.[back]
16. Just like this essay, amiright?[back]
17. Imagine if E.L. James chose to do this from Christian Grey’s point of view instead of publishing Grey. Sure, the original trilogy would be 15,000 pages long, but the immersion would be 100%, resulting in societal breakdown and leading directly to the scenarios depicted in the Mad Max films.[back]
18. In fact, some people earnestly advise you to buy a paperback copy of the book and rip it in three: The main narrative into two equal shares, and then the endnotes, then tape the endnotes to the first half and read it, then tape it to the second half and read it. This not only gives you the classic aura of Literary Hobo (hot), it spares you the back strain of carrying that book around.[back]
19. Unlike this essay, which you likely stopped reading ten minutes ago. Hello?[back]