Order and Disorder

Abstract

Order and disorder in the storytelling can have a significant impact on how a reader receives, comprehends, and interprets a story. In the most orderly narration, the unfolding of time in the story may appear to be quite natural, and its analogy with ‘clock time’ or ‘calendar time’ gives it a good claim to be normative. However, in casual oral storytelling, people often loop back or flash forward to introduce salient information. A certain degree of disorderliness (as in, ‘by the way, this had happened earlier,’ or, ‘did I forget to tell you that …’) is also natural and normative. Purely chronological narration may be less ‘natural’ than it looks at first. Few people would argue that extremely disorderly narration proves more challenging to follow, and experimental writers have often exploited disorder (at the end of this chapter, I describe an influential case of such an experiment, William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’). Some kinds of disorder, however, are quite conventional and even traditional, as in the in medias res opening of classical epic, as described by Horace. While modernist fiction often exploits the effects of disorder, the Bildungsroman and fictional autobiography typically follow a chronological pattern.KeywordsPlot LinePlot EventAnterior NarrationNarrative TheoristExperimental WriterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.