“The notion of a multi-linear story is difficult to accept. After all, much of the way we live depends on linearity: we follow lines of thought, lines of communication, lines of music, lines on the page and lines on the road. When it comes to story telling, we have every reason to think in linear terms; it might be the only way to get our stories straight, so to speak.”
- a conventionalist
Conventional thinking, like that above, endorses the mandatory author directed reading experience inherent in a novel. Dominated by “the tyranny of the line,” narratives imbedded in the medium of print must naturally have a beginning, middle and an end. From this perspective the story presented in a work of literature is necessarily constant and chronologically coherent.
These seemingly fundamental concepts, however, have been called into serious contention with the advent of hypertext and narrative fiction in modern digital culture. The presence of hypertext in a digital fiction gives rise to potential for the reformatting of narrative pathways depending on how a reader navigates. To make an analogous claim: in a hypertextual story
the reader is handed a map and told to explore, where as a conventional printed text would simply take the reader along state highway one.
Under a digital regime, the materiality of the text changes in favour of increasingly networked, decentred and indeterminate formats. In digital texts narrative is married to database, and the consequent need for pattern recognition, repetition, navigation and spatial design creates an interactive relationship between the reader and the text. Within this integrated model “the act of reading becomes somewhat associative, and readings go in multiple directions, with readers forging paths, backing up, redirecting themselves, and, occasionally, arriving at dead ends” (Scott Carpenter, "Click Here" 2001). Hypertexts are elusive; many contain emergent and recombinatory narratives which force continual reassessment of the story in question. Unlike books, which have a definite ending, hypertexts may loop indefinitely and simply resist any form of totalising interpretation.
Essentially, multi-linear texts tend to create a story world rather than a journey from A to B. Hypertexts end when the reader is satisfied; he/she creates their own linearity amidst an atmosphere that may make them feel both empowered and lost. In hyperfiction disorientation can be an aesthetic tool and one of the biggest affronts to the conventionalist is that “no two people have ever read the same book” (Carpenter).