Nonlinear narrative
Nonlinear narrative, disjointed narrative, or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique 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.
Literature
Beginning a non-linear narrative in medias res 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
- Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
- Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
- William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury
- Sadeq Hedayat's The Blind Owl
- James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
- Flann O'Brien 's At Swim-Two-Birds
- Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo
- William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch
- Joseph Heller's Catch-22
- Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch
- N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn
- Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
- Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato
- Stephen King's It
- Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars
- Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient
- Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting
- Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
- Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost
- David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas
- Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad
- Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus
- Will Self's Umbrella
- Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See
- Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven
Scott McCloud argues in Understanding Comics that the narration of comics is nonlinear because it relies on the reader's choices and interactions.
Film
Defining nonlinear structure in film is, at times, difficult. Films may use extensive flashbacks or flashforwards within a linear storyline, while nonlinear films often contain linear sequences. Orson Welles' Citizen Kane —influenced structurally by The Power and the Glory —and Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon use a non-chronological flashback narrative that is often labeled nonlinear.Silent and early era
Experimentation with nonlinear structure in film dates back to the silent film era, including D. W. Griffith's Intolerance and Abel Gance's Napoléon. Nonlinear film emerged from the French avant-garde in 1924 with René Clair’s Entr'acte, Dadaïst film and then in 1929 with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien Andalou. The surrealist film jumps into fantasy and juxtaposes images, granting the filmmakers an ability to create statements about the Church, art, and society that are left open to interpretation. Buñuel and Dalí's L'Âge d'Or also uses nonlinear concepts. The revolutionary Soviet filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Alexander Dovzhenko also experimented with the possibilities of nonlinearity. Eisenstein's Strike and Dovzhenko's Earth hint at a nonlinear experience. English director Humphrey Jennings used a nonlinear approach in his World War II documentary Listen to Britain.Post-World War II
's works since 1959 were also important in the evolution of nonlinear film. Godard famously stated, "I agree that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end - but not necessarily in that order". Godard's Week End , as well as Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, defy linear structure in exchange for a chronology of events that is seemingly random. Alain Resnais experimented with narrative and time in his films Hiroshima mon amour, L'Année dernière à Marienbad, and Muriel. Federico Fellini defined his own nonlinear cinema with the films La Strada, La Dolce Vita, 8½, Fellini Satyricon, and Roma, as did Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky with his modernist films Solaris, The Mirror and Nostalghia. Nicolas Roeg's films, including Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Bad Timing are characterized by a nonlinear approach. Other mainstream nonlinear filmmakers include Michelangelo Antonioni, Peter Greenaway, Chris Marker, Theo Angelopoulos, Agnès Varda, Raúl Ruiz, Carlos Saura, Alain Robbe-Grillet.In the United States, Robert Altman carried the nonlinear motif in his films, including McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park. Woody Allen embraced the experimental nature of nonlinear narrative in Annie Hall, Interiors, and Stardust Memories.
1990s and 2000s
In the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino influenced a tremendous increase in the popularity of nonlinear films, most notably Pulp Fiction. He also used nonlinear narrative in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill and The Hateful Eight. Critics have referred shifting of timeline as Tarantino effect. Other important nonlinear films include Atom Egoyan's Exotica, Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, and Karen and Jill Sprecher's Thirteen Conversations About One Thing. David Lynch experimented with nonlinear narrative and surrealism in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire.In the years leading into and the beginning of the 21st century, some filmmakers have returned to the use of nonlinear narrative repeatedly, including Steven Soderbergh in Schizopolis, Out of Sight, The Limey, Full Frontal, Solaris, and Che ; and Christopher Nolan in Following, Memento, Batman Begins, The Prestige, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer. Memento, with its fragmentation and reverse chronology, has been described as characteristic of moving towards postmodernism in contemporary cinema. Another example would be Terrence Malick's acclaimed The Tree of Life. The element of reverse chronology was explored further in Gaspar Noé's 2002 film Irréversible. Noé's 2009 film Enter the Void also used an uncommon narrative structure as a man recalls his life through flashbacks at the time of his death, induced by the use of psychedelic drugs. Richard Linklater used nonlinear narrative in Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly ; Gus Van Sant in Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park. Alejandro González Iñárritu's film Babel is an example of fragmented narrative structure. Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai explored nonlinear storylines in the films Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love, and 2046. Fernando Meirelles in City of God and The Constant Gardener. Some of Alejandro González Iñárritu's films feature nonlinear narratives, including the ones written by Guillermo Arriaga who also uses nonlinear narratives in his other screenplays. Charlie Kaufman is also known for his fondness of nonlinear storytelling as applied in Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Takashi Shimizu's Japanese horror series, Ju-on, brought to America as The Grudge, is also nonlinear in its storytelling. Director Martin Koolhoven has made more movies with a nonlinear narrative, but the most notorious one is probably his controversial western Brimstone, which premiered in the 2016 Venice Film Festival. Director Vetrimaaran made the Tamil-language thriller film Vada Chennai which has a nonlinear narrative structure. Another Tamil-language film, Iravin Nizhal, has a single-shot non-linear structure. Friend of the World is broken up into chapters, which has a nonlinear plot.