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Concept
Nonlinear narrative
Summary
Nonlinear narrative, disjointed narrative, or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film, video games, and other narratives, where events are portrayed, for example, out of chronological order or in other ways where the narrative does not follow the direct causality pattern of the events featured, such as parallel distinctive plot lines, dream immersions or narrating another story inside the main plot-line. The technique is common in electronic literature, and particularly in hypertext fiction, and is also well-established in print and other sequential media.
Electronic literatureHypertext fiction and Generative literature
Beginning a non-linear narrative in medias res (Latin: "into the middle of things") began in ancient times and was used as a convention of epic poetry, including Homer's Iliad in the 8th century BC. The technique of narrating most of the story in flashback is also seen in epic poetry, like the Indian epic the Mahabharata. Several medieval Arabian Nights tales such as "The City of Brass" and "The Three Apples" also had nonlinear narratives employing the in medias res and flashback techniques. The medieval English poem Beowulf also utilizes a non-linear structure, focusing on events throughout the life of the titular character rather than describing them in a linear narrative.
From the late 19th century and early 20th century, modernist novelists Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner experimented with narrative chronology and abandoning linear order.
Examples of nonlinear novels are:
Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67)
Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (ca. 1833)
Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915)
William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Sadeq Hedayat's The Blind Owl (1937)
James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939)
Flann O'Brien (pseudonym for Brian O'Nolan)'s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo (1955)
William S.
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